The University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine has been awarded a two-year $314,688 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create an original, open access digital collection of archival, primary, and interpretive materials related to the history of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic in the US. The University of Michigan Library, through its Scholarly Publishing Office, is contributing digital conversion, hosting, and archiving services to the project.
The project will include about 50,000 pages of original materials that document the experiences of 50 diverse communities in the US in fall 1918 and winter 1919 when influenza took the lives of an estimated 675,000 Americans. The collection’s primary resources comprise letters and correspondence, minutes of organisations and groups, reports from agencies and charities, newspaper accounts, military records, diaries, photographs and more.
According to Dr. Howard Markel, the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine, ‘The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919: A Digital Encyclopedia’ will be the first to document exhaustively the impact of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic on one nation. This will permit scholars to explore how the 1918 influenza epidemic influenced many communities and sub-communities in the early twentieth-century United States. Also, it will help understand how individuals and society responded to a health crisis of extraordinary magnitude.
Online implementation of the digital collection will take place through collaboration with the Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) of the UM Library. The SPO partners with faculty at UM and beyond to provide sustainable digital publishing services that place preservation and access at the center of its efforts. The Library is also a lead partner in the Google Book Search project and in HathiTrust, an inter-institutional repository of millions of digitised books.
‘The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919: A Digital Encyclopedia’ will be launched in 2012 at www.influenzaarchive.org. The project team is led by Stern and Markel and includes J. Alexander Navarro, Mary Beth Reilly and Julie Judkins, all based at the Center for the History of Medicine. The digital encyclopaedia is the culmination of more than five years of the Center’s ongoing research in collaboration with the Global Migration and Quarantine Division of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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