The 1918 Pandemic in Ann Arbor, Michigan

On Positionality, Absence, and Intent

I want this archive to encourage archivists and communities today to preserve diverse records of Americans’ experience in the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite being one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, leaving 50-100 million people worldwide dead, the 1918 pandemic seems to get glossed over in American history. The majority of articles and think pieces I found about the legacy of 1918, including some of the academic papers, were published in March 2020 and after. I could only find confirmation of a single American memorial to the victims of the 1918 flu. There were a couple of articles about the pandemic at UM, and the AADL’s archives used tags that made it relatively easy to find contemporary articles from Ann Arbor about the pandemic. But most of the other items in my collection were preserved incidentally. At least digitally, no one seems to have made a significant effort to focus on remembering or memorializing the pandemic in this community. The only substantial digital archive I could find dedicated to the 1918 Pandemic at all was the Influenza Encyclopedia, which has done a tremendous job documenting the pandemic in 50 large US cities. But it seems that, especially in our smallscale and local histories, we had largely forgotten about the 1918 Pandemic until the shock of this year’s pandemic forced us to remember it.

Newspapers at the time tended to downplay the severity of the pandemic in favor of keeping spirits high for the war effort. The pandemic struck so quickly and with such ferocity that many Americans, including doctors and nurses, said they could not keep up with medical, let alone personal, recordkeeping. The sudden chaos of the pandemic also left many medical professionals frustrated and ashamed about the lack of answers and solutions they had for the disease.