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https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...06391a-7b53-11ea-b6ff-597f170df8f8_story.html
America’s response to coronavirus pandemic is ‘incomprehensibly incoherent,’ says historian who studied the 1918 flu
John M. Barry, 73, is a historian and author of several books, including "The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History," about the 1918 flu pandemic. He lives in New Orleans.
The 1918 flu killed tens of millions of people, including more than half a million people in the United States, but I don’t remember being taught much of anything about it in school. Why are we not more familiar with how devastating it was?
Well, until a couple of decades ago, historians wrote only about what people did to people. It was very unusual for historians to write about what nature did to people. Another thing is because of the war and the infrastructure of propaganda that [President] Wilson had created, newspapers didn’t write about it. And if they did, it was some relatively inconsequential article.
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We expect this pandemic to change us in ways we don’t even conceive of yet. How did the 1918 flu change the way people lived and society overall?
I think it contributed to the culture of the Roaring Twenties, the idea that, you know, let’s not worry about tomorrow, a sense of fatalism. I think it contributed to that mood. Fitzgerald wrote, “All gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken.” It was part of the ennui that came over this country. But in terms of actual daily life changes, I don’t think there was anything measurable. It lasted a very short period, and people were distracted by the war then.
How would you characterize the United States’s response to the pandemic?
In a local paper I gave Trump a 3.5 a couple of days ago, but I was being overly generous.
America’s response to coronavirus pandemic is ‘incomprehensibly incoherent,’ says historian who studied the 1918 flu
John M. Barry, 73, is a historian and author of several books, including "The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History," about the 1918 flu pandemic. He lives in New Orleans.
The 1918 flu killed tens of millions of people, including more than half a million people in the United States, but I don’t remember being taught much of anything about it in school. Why are we not more familiar with how devastating it was?
Well, until a couple of decades ago, historians wrote only about what people did to people. It was very unusual for historians to write about what nature did to people. Another thing is because of the war and the infrastructure of propaganda that [President] Wilson had created, newspapers didn’t write about it. And if they did, it was some relatively inconsequential article.
============================================================================
We expect this pandemic to change us in ways we don’t even conceive of yet. How did the 1918 flu change the way people lived and society overall?
I think it contributed to the culture of the Roaring Twenties, the idea that, you know, let’s not worry about tomorrow, a sense of fatalism. I think it contributed to that mood. Fitzgerald wrote, “All gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken.” It was part of the ennui that came over this country. But in terms of actual daily life changes, I don’t think there was anything measurable. It lasted a very short period, and people were distracted by the war then.
How would you characterize the United States’s response to the pandemic?
In a local paper I gave Trump a 3.5 a couple of days ago, but I was being overly generous.