Dispatches from 1918
It’s hard to imagine what the world will look like when COVID-19 has passed. So in this episode, we look back to the years after 1918, at the political, artistic, and viral aftermath of the flu pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people and left our world permanently transformed.
This episode was reported and produced by Rachael Cusick, Tad Davis, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Latif Nasser, Sarah Qari, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, with production assistance from Tad Davis and Bethel Habte.
Special thanks to the Radio Diaries podcast for letting us use an excerpt of their interview with Harry Mills. You can find the original episode here. For more on Egon Schiele’s life, check out the Leopold Museum’s biography, by Verena Gamper.
Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.
- Duration
- 1h 13m
- Broadcast on
- 17 Jul 2020
- Audio Format
- other
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
It’s hard to imagine what the world will look like when COVID-19 has passed. So in this episode, we look back to the years after 1918, at the political, artistic, and viral aftermath of the flu pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people and left our world permanently transformed.
This episode was reported and produced by Rachael Cusick, Tad Davis, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Latif Nasser, Sarah Qari, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, with production assistance from Tad Davis and Bethel Habte.
Special thanks to the Radio Diaries podcast for letting us use an excerpt of their interview with Harry Mills. You can find the original episode here. For more on Egon Schiele’s life, check out the Leopold Museum’s biography, by Verena Gamper.
Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
WNYC Studios is supported by WISE. WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. With a WISE account, you can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies, with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get WISE. Download the WISE app today. Terms and conditions apply. Oh, wait, you're listening to RadioLab. From WNYC. Jad? Hey. Hey. How's it going? Good. I'm Jad A, this is RadioLab with Dispatches 6 through 10. Pat Walter, senior editor, is going to start us off. OK. OK, so you and Molly had this idea to do an episode about the 1918 flu. And whenever I get into something historical, I go to the newspaper archives. OK. I just, I think they're so cool. You know, coronavirus is in the news everywhere. We've been talking about this on the show. And I thought like, oh, what did this look like in 1918? But yeah, so I decided to just like go to the New York Times archive, start in October, which was like the peak of the second wave of the 1918 flu. So sort of like people are talking about how things are opening up again. And like we might have a, we might have a second spike of the coronavirus. And like what people are afraid of is that what happened in 1918 will happen now, which is it was pretty bad when it emerged in the winter of 1918 in the beginning of the year. And then it kind of went away. And then everyone was like, oh, it's gone. And went back to normal and that fall it spiked. And like most of the people who died in that flu died in this second fall. I didn't know that that's, I actually honestly didn't know that that's the trajectory it took. It kind of freaks me out. I have to be honest. Anyhow, OK, sorry. So yeah, so you go to the New York Times in the fall of 1918. And I remember it's struggling to find the flu. It's all World War I. The front page of the paper on October 1st, 1918 has huge like 20-point font headline across the whole page. Bulgaria quits the war. Turkey may follow. Wars fiercest fighting on Cambrai front. I don't know what these things mean. I don't understand where we're one enough to know what I need this means, but it's just like all war. French advance on every front.
Transcription truncated.
It’s hard to imagine what the world will look like when COVID-19 has passed. So in this episode, we look back to the years after 1918, at the political, artistic, and viral aftermath of the flu pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people and left our world permanently transformed.
This episode was reported and produced by Rachael Cusick, Tad Davis, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Latif Nasser, Sarah Qari, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, with production assistance from Tad Davis and Bethel Habte.
Special thanks to the Radio Diaries podcast for letting us use an excerpt of their interview with Harry Mills. You can find the original episode here. For more on Egon Schiele’s life, check out the Leopold Museum’s biography, by Verena Gamper.
Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.