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Reflecting on the 1918 Flu Pandemic in the wake of COVID-19

In 2018, Defining Moments Canada marked the centenary of the 1918 Flu Pandemic with the launch of a website full of historical and educational resources and the Recovering Canada contest which celebrated innovative digital classroom commemorations.

Two years later, that work has taken on new meaning as classrooms are forced to go digital and people everywhere confront a new global pandemic, unprecedented in our lifetimes.

Across Canada, our historians and teachers are rising to the occasion: showing us the lessons that history can teach us, and using history to help their students confront the present.

In addition to our already existing Flu resources, we’ll be curating a list of articles, educator resources, and media that may be useful and interesting to you. If there’s something in particular you’re looking for, let us know – we may be able to find it!

If you have something you’d like to share, please send us a note at info@canhist.ca.

Best of luck to all teachers and educators embarking on a new digital education journey!

On our own website, explore the 1918-1919 Flu Pandemic historical content, including themed articles, microhistories, and a storymap. We have updated our Flu 101 article to be a general primer on pandemics, from the perspective of a world with COVID-19. Our resources for teaching the Flu can serve as an entry point to help students think about the unprecedented circumstances they’re living in now as an historian. You can find more Flu Pandemic resources online courtesy of the McMaster Youth and Children University and the Nova Scotia Museum. If you want something to listen to while self-isolating, we recommend the Going Viral podcast – part scientific detective story, part historical inquiry, this podcast rediscovers the experience of the 1918-1919 Flu Pandemic.

Part scientific detective story, part historical inquiry, ‘Going Viral’ takes listeners to the scene of a viral crime and in the process recovers the experience of the world’s deadliest virus, which is 100 years old. If the world were haunted by another devastating pandemic, how would we cope?

Check out the winning project from our Recovering Canada project: Coordination, Capacity Building, and Communication: The Spanish Flu in Toronto, and read about the leading educator, Katy Whitfield and her work on that project. Katy has continued this work into COVID-19, developing a curation and record-keeping digital project for this pandemic called Stories of Self-Isolation. She wrote about the project for OHASSTA, and you can access the Google Form and more information here.

With further thought to how students will remember their experience in this truly historical moment, Irish historian Ida Milne used her experience as a Flu expert to share thoughts on how we should be documenting and recording this current pandemic. While American, this “Journal of a Plague Year” hosted on the Omeka platform is an interesting example of what people are adding to the history.

Matt Henderson, a Governor General Award winning educator from Manitoba, has incorporated content from the Defining Moments Canada website into a practical program for online learning. He wrote about this work for CBC, emphasizing the need for caution and mindfulness when developing such projects.

Neil Orford, another Governor General award-winning educator and our Project Leader, spoke with Samantha Cutrara about how the 1918 Flu Pandemic can be used to help students better understand and interpret current news about COVID-19.

Dr. Esyllt Jones, a Canadian historian of health and disease, recently wrote about the implications of the 1918-1919 Flu pandemic at Active History, where she also wrote an article as part of a special Flu series in 2018.

The University of Northern British Columbia’s Northern BC Archives have created a local primary source analysis teaching resource regarding the 1918 epidemic in the Prince George area. The resource is built around a wealth of primary documents, supported by lessons and learning tools.

Active History and Canada’s History have also collected lists of resources to help teachers teach pandemic content:

Active History – Learning From Past Pandemics: Resources on the 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic in Canada

Canada’s History – Teaching COVID-19

Many journalists and historians have spoken in the media about the Flu Pandemic and COVID-19. We will keep the list below updated as we find new pieces.

• Flu epidemic of 1918 warns us of coronavirus risk to frontline workers (Ida Milne, The Irish Times)
• How the 1918 Flu Pandemic felled nearly as many Canadians as the war (John Lorinc, Canada’s History/Defining Moments Canada)
• History reminds us, and gives us hope, Newmarket: We will get through this (Richard MacLeod, Newmarkettoday.ca)
• What the Spanish flu may teach us about COVID-19 (John Ackerman, CityNews1130)
• Lessons learned from the Spanish Flu (CHCH News)
• A history of Canadian quarantines (Interview with historian Chris Rutty, CTV News)
• Today’s Christian Island decision are informed by Spanish Flu of 1919 (Jeff Monague, Orilliamatters.com)
• What the 1918 flu pandemic can teach us about coronavirus drug trials (Laura Spinney, The Guardian)
• Are measures designed to control the spread of coronavirus working? And at what cost? (Svenn-Erik Mamelund, Oslomet)
• Pandemics and the Shape of Human History (Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker)
• Social vs. Physical Distancing: How Pandemics affect our vernacular (Andrew Jeffrey, CBC News)
• Quick to act: How Ottawa quelled the Spanish flu in 1918 (Dave Allston, Kitchissippi Times)
• How pandemics have remade politics, societies, and culture (CBC News)
• Two pandemics, 102 years apart: echoes of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic (Interview with historian Heather MacDougall, CBC News)
• The Lessons to Be Learned from Past Pandemics (Vincent Geloso, MEI)
• Lessons from the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic (CBC’s Frontburner)
• What we’ve learned from the Spanish flu – and what we haven’t (Geoff McMaster, Folio, University of Alberta)

For more pieces focus on the 1918 Flu Pandemic written before COVID-19, check out the list below.

• Weathering an Epidemic: A Look at the University of Alberta during the Spanish Flu (Hallie Brodie, The Quad – University of Alberta)
• A century after the Spanish flu hit N.S., historians now chronicling the impact (Moira Donovan, CBC News)
• Killer Flu (Susan Goldenberg, Canada’s History)

If you have something you’d like to share, please send us a note at info@canhist.ca.

At this time, we’re only able to offer this list in English, although we will include French resources as we are made aware of them. If you’re interested in curating a French-language list, please contact info@canhist.ca.