Library of Congress's Blog, page 60

My Job: Victoria Van Hyning

[image error]Victoria Van Hyning is a senior innovation specialist and a community manager for the Library’s By the People crowdsourcing project. Her academic studies focused on medieval and Renaissance English literature and the fate of British nuns after the Reformation. Her book on this research, “Convent Autobiography: Early Modern English Nuns in Exile” was recently published by Oxford University Press. Intrigued, we asked how this background led to her work at the Library.

In college, you read “A Revelation of Love” by Julian of Norwich, a 14th century ascetic who wrote about the religious visions she had while seriously ill. It’s one of the oldest known works by a woman in the English language, if not the oldest. What about it spoke to you?

I was fascinated that Julian lived most of her life in solitude as an anchoress—paradoxically withdrawing from the world to make it a better place by trying to understand her visions. She portrays a maternal God, who loves humanity despite sin. This interested me as someone who grew up attending a fairly relaxed Quaker meeting where sin was not emphasized. Her famous phrase, “al shall be wele, and al shall be wele, and all manner thing shal be wele,” has appealed to readers for nearly six centuries.

In college, I spent a year studying at Oxford, learning about Julian with a world-class expert. It was a life-changing experience. I went back to Oxford for a master’s, which led to a Ph.D. at the University of Sheffield. I focused on the Catholic nuns and monks who read Julian’s texts after the Reformation and saved them from obscurity by copying them out by hand.

The English nuns you write about went into exile after the Reformation in the 16th century, when it became more or less illegal to practice Catholicism in England. Where did they go? What did they do?

Some women returned to their families, perhaps practicing a quasi-monastic life at home, while others joined Flemish, French, Italian, Spanish or other convents abroad. Only one English community—the Bridgettines — managed to resist closure.

Over time, though, many English women wanted to create English or Irish convents. Between 1598 and the French Revolution, 26 convents were established, including one in Maryland. (A descendant community of Carmelite nuns is still in Towson.) These new communities were of a variety of orders—Benedictine, Augustinian, Carmelite. The Augustinians I write about were fairly international, multilingual and musical. Travelers would make a point of stopping at their convents during their jaunts across Europe.

In some ways, convents walled off these women from the rest of the world, but in other ways, they allowed them an intellectual and theological freedom they probably wouldn’t have had on the outside. Given this, what did they write about?

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Convent illustration from the English Convent of Nazareth, Bruges. Created in the 20th century but in a medieval style. Photo: Victoria Van Hyning.

Nuns still had a lot of contact with clergy and outsiders. They could read, write, compose music and teach. They could write translations, spiritual advice manuals, original prayers, devotional poetry, one or two personal letters per year and so on. Senior nuns typically took responsibility for writing the chronicles, which were important historical documents about the community as a whole. Those who wrote anonymously—and most did—could safely write about themselves in great detail without seeming immodest. I argue in the book that anonymity was liberating.

The term “17th century convent” conveys images of stern conversations, spare rooms, stone floors, contemplative prayer. Is that wrong?

There was sanctity and seriousness, but there was joy and laughter, too. And sarcasm. And pragmatism. Many of these women were smart — capable of wringing funds from reluctant or distracted donors, capable of fending off clerics and government officials. This comes through in their chronicles, letters, and other literature.

They also held jubilees to mark special occasions or anniversaries. One prioress-chronicler describes the Bruges convent’s centenary, for which there were special masses and prayers, an original play by the convent novices and school kids. The nuns also provided bread and beer to their neighbors and the city’s poor, and were delighted – and maybe a little freaked out — when their neighbors set off blank canons from the top of the convent walls and held a raucous street party on the other side.

[image error]How did your research for the book lead you into crowdsourcing?

During my Ph.D., I did research in monastic archives all over England, France, and Belgium. Several monastic communities allowed me to photograph hundreds of their manuscripts and books, which greatly aided me and an informal network of convents, scholars and genealogists to transcribe and share those documents. This archival work led me to think volunteers could help with transcriptions.

I then got involved in crowdsourcing with a group called Zooniverse in the Department of Astrophysics at Oxford. I expanded their humanities program, helped develop news transcription methods and led the development of a Renaissance manuscript transcription project called “Shakespeare’s World” with the Folger Shakespeare Library and Oxford English Dictionary. From 2016 to 2018, I led the project “Transforming Libraries and Archives Through Crowdsourcing.” Much though I loved Zooniverse and the work I did there, when this job at the Library came up I couldn’t resist!

So what’s your work like here at the Library.

As the community manager for collections and data, I work with the By the People team, curators and educators to identify and present collections in ways that appeal to volunteers, while also generating high quality transcription data. We started out as a pilot project in October 2018 and graduated to being a permanent project in early 2020.

Our team has designed and launched 15 collections-based campaigns in a year and a half. These feature the papers of Rosa Parks; letters sent to President Lincoln; the papers of suffrage leaders Mary Church Terrell and Susan B. Anthony; and the field notebooks of ethno-musicologist Alan Lomax, among others. Volunteers have transcribed over 113,000 pages so far, which is a testament to their enthusiasm!

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Dav Pilkey: “Love inspires us to become better people.”

We’re back with our Friday check-in with author and illustrator Dav Pilkey, the bestselling children’s writer behind the wildly popular series “Dog Man” and “Captain Underpants.”

Like a lot of authors that publish for that age range, there’s a mix of vulnerability and heart that informs his work. Cartoon strips such as “Peanuts” or “Calvin and Hobbes” (among many others) had that same underpinning of intelligence and kindness; there was a sense of both the wonders and insecurities of childhood that lurked behind the pratfalls and pranks that played for laughs.

In this short montage, Pilkey explains the origins of Petey, one of primary characters in “Dog Man.” As you might expect, he didn’t wander far from home for his inspiration.

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In previous episodes, he’s shown us how to draw the characters Flippy and Big Jim. He’ll be back next week, so be sure to visit with us again.

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By the People: Meet the Blackwells

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Blackwell family portrait, circa 1848. Manuscript Division. 

Don’t let byline fool you; the wonderful staff at By the People wrote a goo d chunk of this piece about their latest crowdsourcing campaign. It’s fascinating stuff.

The trailblazing history of the Blackwell family, tireless campaigners for the rights of women and the abolition of slavery, forms the newest crowdsourcing campaign by the Library’s By the People team — which includes you!

By the People, for the unfamiliar, is our platform in which volunteers can transcribe the letters, writings, diaries and artifacts of eminent people in our collections. It’s like looking into the personal lives of some of the most consequential people in American history and writing out the events of their lives, be they prosaic or historic. These transcriptions are checked, verified and then take their place in the digitized, searchable works of the world’s largest library.

Cool, right?

The Blackwell Family papers consist of more than 29,000 items between 1759-1960, with the majority of material dating from 1845 to 1890. Blackwell family members include Lucy Stone (1818-1893); her husband, Henry Browne Blackwell (1825-1909); and their daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950), all of whom were prominent in the women’s rights and women’s suffrage movements. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States and her adopted daughter, Kitty Barry Blackwell (1848-1936), feature prominently in the papers. Other Blackwell family members are also represented within the collection, including Dr. Emily Blackwell, another pioneering female doctor, and Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell, the first woman ordained as a minister in the Congregational Church.

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Lucy Stone, circa 1850. Manuscript Division.

In 1890, second-generation suffragist Alice Stone Blackwell helped to broker a merger of the two major national women’s suffrage organizations, one of which was founded by her parents, Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell. The two organizations put aside their differences to become the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Alice took up the family business of suffrage becoming the recording secretary for NAWSA and eventually the editor of NAWSA’s weekly newspaper, the Woman’s Journal, which her parents began in 1870.

That’s just some of the history you can dig into. It’s a postcard into our own world in another time.

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The History Channel at the Library

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Want to see what was in President Abraham Lincoln’s pockets when he was assassinated? The “Wanted” poster for his assassin, John Wilkes Booth? A perfect copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the first book published by metal type (in 1454), thereby revolutionizing human communication?

Well, you can! The Library and the History Channel teamed up several years ago to produce a collection of more than two dozen short, entertaining videos that showcased some of the Library’s greatest, most unusual and startling treasures. All of the above and many others are featured in the series. We’ll be highlighting them in the weeks to come.

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President Lincoln’s glasses. They were in his pocket the night of his assassination.

Maybe the best news is that this isn’t a huge time commitment — each video is only a couple of minutes long. Each is explained on camera by a curator and there’s a short essay in the link that explains the contents of each. You can watch one at a time if you like, but that’s like trying to each just one chocolate chip cookie when you’ve got a box full of them. (Good luck with that!) It’s also a smart, fun introduction to the world’s largest Library.

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Jason Reynolds, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Presents New GRAB THE MIC Newsletter

This newsletter is the first in a series of guest blogs from Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. 

I’ve been quiet, trying to find the words to offer myself, my family and, of course, you. But the truth is, my words and my thoughts aren’t any more important than yours or anyone else’s—we’ve all got them—and many of us have shared them on our various platforms. This sharing sometimes brings on more anxiety, and other times washes us with hope. And both of these feelings birthed by all these shared thoughts are honest. So, some honesty: The tricky part about my title as ambassador is that it doesn’t come with answers. It doesn’t come with medical education, and there’s nothing inscribed on the back of the ambassador medal that tells me anything that leads us closer to the end of this strange time. But what I’d like to believe is that there are things we all have that can help us cope, help us hold each other up and press on in the face of a peculiar uncertainty.

Things like, I don’t know … cake.

Or better yet, ice cream. But not just any ice cream: ice cream that could change flavors right in the middle of eating it, because sometimes chocolate is good for a spoonful, but not a whole scoop. I know this seems like a silly thing to say right now, but the only thing that’s helping me through all this is my silliness. Not just the clunky jokes rattling around my brain, but the silliness that allows me to stretch out—to think beyond the walls of my home, or the length of my block. The silliness that’s actually not silliness at all, just imagination cloaked in jokes. Yes, imagination—the only thing I’ve ever been able to count on, even though my imagination can’t always count on me. Because these are the moments in which I, unfortunately, convince myself to push imagination away. To force it back behind the wall of fear. And though fear and concern are both very real, they are no more real than imagination, right? I mean, why should they get to have all the fun?

Imagination is what has given us food and shelter. Imagination has given us clothes and education. Imagination has given us social media and video games. It’s given us music. And definitely literature. It’s even given us hand sanitizer, which is basically the same as … well, literature. It’s sometimes a little strange, and a little stinky, but becomes an amazing habit because you know rubbing it in (there’s no washing it off!) kills germs—the invisible germs that have attached themselves to us as we move through life. Literature kills germs! Maybe there is some kind of medical education that comes with this whole ambassadorship thing after all.

(Note: Literature doesn’t kill actual germs. But see how I imagined that? I’m like an imagination machine!)

The point is, as April continues to unfold, which—let us not forget— is National Poetry Month,

let’s try as hard as we can to let our imaginations out of their cages so they can storm the gates of anxiety. Let’s make words that make worlds. Poems that feed us something sweet—or at least something honest. Or maybe something sweet and honest and sour and honest and funny and honest and scary and honest, like ice cream that changes flavors right in the middle of eating it.

Sound good? Sure sounds good to me.

Before you go, check out my new video series.

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Sincerely,

Jason

Cartography of Contagion in the 19th Century

This is a guest post by Edward Redmond, a reference specialist in the Geography and Maps Division. It was originally published on the Worlds Revealed blog on April 3. Here, he discusses how maps of the 19th century documented the spread of diseases across the U.S., much as we lean on more sophisticated maps today to understand the spread of COVID-19.

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 This is one of six maps depicting the distribution of typhoid, pneumonia, rheumatism, tuberculosis, and malarial infections. “Carney’s series of medical charts showing location in the United States.” L.H. Carney. New York: G.W. & C.B. Colton & Co., 1874. Geography and Map Division. 

Originally published in 1874, these maps of the eastern half of the United States were designed to show the distribution of diseases including typhoid, malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and rheumatism. The maps were published by one “L.H. Carney, M.D.,” but we have found no biographical data on the author. Medical data (in the form of statistics) is not shown and the maps are simply shaded to show the severity of infection.

The map shown above, interestingly enough, shows few malarial infections in West Virginia, just as it the Mountain State was unaffected in the early stages of the current pandemic of COVID-19. Is it an accident of geography? Topography? Or was the area so sparsely inhabited that there were fewer reported infections than in other locations?

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 This map shows the distribution of tuberculosis in 1874.”Carney’s series of medical charts showing location in the United States of America,”  L.H. Carney.  New York: G.W. & C.B. Colton & Co., 1874. Geography and Map Division.

Conversely, this map showing the distribution of tuberculosis (red shading), focuses on major population centers rather than the map showing malarial infections (green shading) along major river systems. Even though medical statistics are not provided, one can infer by comparing the two maps that 19th-century tuberculosis cases may have been accelerated due to close living conditions in major population centers.

At roughly the same time the above maps were being prepared by commercial publishers, the United States government was producing — in association with “eminent men of science” — statistical atlases from information gathered during the 1870, 1880, and 1890 censuses. Each atlas contains statistics, displayed in a graphic form on a map, denoting the approximate number and type of mortal diseases in the late 19th century.

The image below, for example, is from the 1870 “Statistical atlas of the United States” and provides a graphic illustration of the ratio between deaths from malarial diseases as opposed to all other causes of deaths. The darker the shading translates to a higher number of deaths.

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Plate showing deaths from malarial diseases in 1870. ”Statistical atlas of the United States based on the results of the ninth census with contributions from many eminent men of science and several departments of the government.” Francis Amasa Walker. United States Census Office. Ninth Census, 1870.  New York. J. Bien, lith, 1874. 

In 1978, the government issued its last published National Atlas representing demographics and statistics in the mid-20th century. According to the 1970 census, the number of regular and specialized care hospital beds differed greatly by state. The two plates below provide information on the number of hospital beds (general, specialized, and federal) as well as the number of medical professionals in each state.
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Plate shows distribution of hospital beds and medical services by state in 1970. “The national atlas of the United States of America.” Geological Survey, U.S., and Arch C. Gerlach. Washington, 1970. Geography and Map Division. 

 

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Plate show mortality and distribution of medical professionals by state. “The national atlas of the United States of America.” Geological Survey, U.S., and Arch C. Gerlach.  Washington, 1970. Geography and Map Division.  

Finally, the maps provided above are intended as a way to use the historical collections of the Library to help understand the tragic situation that we now face.  There will undoubtedly be statistical information published in the form of maps and digital data from this pandemic to help later generations understand the spread of disease.

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Parents! Dav Pilkey Shows The Kids (And You) How to Draw Flippy! Plus Music!

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Happy Friday!

We are delighted that our friend Dav Pilkey is back with another of his how-to-draw videos. He’s the creator of the “Captain Underpants” and “Dog Man” series (among lots of other stuff). This week he shows us how to draw — claw by claw and fin by fin — Flippy the Fish!

It also features the first ever Flip-o-rama video with music from “Dog Man: The Musical,” so it’s pretty much a day of unlimited entertainment. Give it a shot. It’s fun.

If you missed it last week, he showed us how to draw Big Jim, the seven-foot-tall cat from “Dog Man.” He’ll be back next Friday with more, so be sure to come back. Or, easier, just hit the subscribe link below.

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Reading Music in Braille

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Ayaka Isono, courtesy of  the pianist. 

Ayaka Isono lost her vision to a rare retinal disorder at age 29 and, devastated, figured her career as a pianist was over.

Isono had spent her adult life teaching and performing at a high level, playing professionally in chamber ensembles and with the San Francisco Symphony and the Oakland Ballet.

But now she was just trying to learn the basic skills of everyday life all over again, to live independently as a blind person. Perform with the ballet or symphony again? She was just trying to learn how to go outside for a walk by herself.

Depressed and unmotivated, Isono quit doing the things she loved most, the things she’d built her life around. She stopped playing piano, stopped going to concerts, stopped listening to music altogether.

“For three years, I didn’t touch any piano or play any music,” she said. “I was just focusing, learning to live as a blind person. Since I didn’t know any blind people, I didn’t know where to start.”

Today, Isono is performing and teaching again, using braille music scores and instructional material she gets from the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS), a program of the Library.

She is one of thousands of blind or visually impaired musicians whose work and passion depend upon the braille music collections at NLS — the largest source of such material in the world.

Those collections are a place to turn to for musicians in need of braille or large print versions of, say, a libretto for “La Bohème,” an instruction book for the accordion, a biography of Billie Holiday, a transcription of Beethoven’s “Pathétique” sonata or even a lead sheet for “Achy Breaky Heart.”

NLS holds more than 25,000 braille transcriptions of musical scores and instructional texts; large-print scores, librettos, reference works and biographies; instructional recordings in music theory, appreciation and performance; and music-related talking books and magazines.

The NLS Music Section filled over 7,000 requests for such material in the past fiscal year, an important resource for blind or visually impaired musicians trying to adapt to an impairment, learn their craft or make it in the music business — no matter their age.

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Tristen Chen. 

Tristen Chen was just 21 months old when he lost his vision because of an eye nerve development delay. But he was a precocious kid, and his parents, Haiyu Chen and Renee Hu, soon noticed he had an unusual talent.

He could, they discovered, listen to recordings of songs, then play them on the piano. When he was 3, Tristen sat at a keyboard and, with no instruction and using both hands, played the Carpenters hit “Yesterday Once More” — the first song he ever played.

“That caught our attention,” Renee said. “He was very good at music, so we started looking for a music teacher.”

Tristen began taking lessons at 4 and, because he couldn’t see printed sheet music, still played by ear. If Tristen gets serious about music, the teacher told Renee, he would need to learn to read braille music. Classical music is too complex to play by ear — Tristen would need to read the notation himself to understand the nuances written into a piece.

“When you’re at a very low level, the kids probably can only remember the notes,” Renee said. “But when the music starts to get complicated, there is a lot of detail — dynamics and a lot of things — he has to read himself. Without braille music, he couldn’t get to this level.”

So, Tristen spent two years learning to read braille music and eventually began borrowing material from NLS. He is now 11 and has been performing in competitions and recitals since 2018, including several performances at venues in Carnegie Hall.

There aren’t many places to which musicians such as Chen and Isono can turn for material.

They could pay to have music transcribed themselves, but it’s expensive — Renee recalled a company charging over $100 to transcribe just four pages of music. Libraries for the blind in Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland and elsewhere commission transcriptions, and NLS buys some material from them. NLS also commissions 40 to 50 transcriptions each year — last year, it produced a braille version of the massively popular musical “Hamilton.”

All of that material is offered free to the public.

“The Library is the only resource I have, the place I can get the braille version of the piece,” Renee says. “We really appreciate this service. It helps a lot financially.”

Advances in technology have made it easier for musicians to access the material. At one time, NLS offered only a limited number of hard copies of braille scores that would be mailed to patrons. Now, about 20 percent of the collection — a figure that increases each year — is digitized and available via download.

All this was new to Isono when she lost her sight in 2001. She didn’t know any blind people, didn’t even know braille music existed. But she learned to read braille text, then taught herself to read braille music — a challenging task even for an accomplished musician.

Eventually, Isono made her way back to her place at the piano. She now performs chamber music with members of the San Francisco Opera, has done recitals in Japan and twice performed at a festival for blind musicians in Morocco.

“Without braille music, I can’t do anything I’m doing right now, including performing,” Isono says. That wouldn’t happen. It’s not possible.”

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John Prine: American Poet at the Library of Congress

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John Prine on stage at the Library of Congress, March 9, 2005.

John Prine wrote songs that sounded simple but weren’t. He sang in a voice that wasn’t pretty but was honest in its unvarnished immediacy. Some of it was funny. Some of it broke your heart. Some people called it Americana; others, folk music.

By any name, the man produced poetry.

He died late Tuesday night from complications of COVID-19. He was 73. He’d survived a host of health problems, including cancer.

It was sad and awful. It was like someone you knew died.  You stared out the window at the rain and there was nothing for it. Sometimes you lose and that’s just all there is.

One night in 2005, the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center hosted an onstage conversation between Prine and Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate. It’s always been one of our most popular interviews.

Prine’s parents were from Kentucky but they raised him in a Chicago suburb. He worked as a mailman and an Army mechanic. He sang at a low-rent Chicago bar called the Fifth Peg. His songs, conversational and without pretension, sounded like all of that. Just about everyone who wrote songs in post-Vietnam America admired or adored his work. It was the real thing. Like crystal, if you tapped his music, it tinged. It was that pure.

“Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism,” Bob Dylan once said. “Midwestern mind-trips to the nth degree.” Bruce Springsteen, who, like Prine, was once dubbed a “new Dylan,” remembered him fondly in a tweet: “…he was never anything but the loveliest guy in the world. A true national treasure and a songwriter for the ages.”  Kooser, from their onstage conversation: “He did a better job of holding up the mirror of art to the ’60s and ’70s than any of our official literary poets. And none of  our poets wrote anything better about Vietnam than Prine’s ‘Sam Stone.’ ”

“Sam Stone” may well be one of the most heartbreaking and effective songs written in the last half of 20th-century American music. Introduced by a funereal organ, it’s a four-minute tale of an American soldier, a young father who comes back a hero from the war in Vietnam. But the war, Prine tells us, had shattered all of Sam’s nerves and “left a little shrapnel in his knee.” Sam becomes a drug addict to ease the pain. He spends all of his family’s money on drugs. (“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes.”) His kids have to wear donated clothes. Sam overdoses and dies. The end.

It was sad and bitter and true, the angst of a nation that seemed to have lost its way. The chorus? “Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.”

If he’d just written about heartbreak and sorrow, that would have been okay, but that wasn’t what elevated his stuff, because the man could just as easily be hilarious. There was an ironic, witty joy to his music. It couldn’t help but make you smile. “Sally used to play with her hula hoops/Now she tells her problems to therapy groups,” he wrote in the dazzling “Sins of Memphisto,” a surreal song from his 1991 album, “The Missing Years,” one of his best. The next line: “Grandpa’s on the front lawn staring at a rake/wondering if his marriage was a terrible mistake.”

In a later duet with Iris DeMent, he found a happy ending for one of his trademark offbeat couples: ”In spite of ourselves we’ll end up a-sittin on a rainbow/Against all odds, honey, we’re the big door-prize.”

So long, John Prine. America wouldn’t be America without you.

“The Great Influenza” — Library Resources on the 1918 to 1919 Pandemic

This article draws on material from the Veterans History Project and the Library’s 2017 exhibit, “Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I.”

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A nurse takes a patient’s pulse in the influenza ward at Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, D.C. , 1918 or 1919. Prints and Photographs Division.

The 1918 to 1919 influenza pandemic killed some 50 million people worldwide, with about 675,000 of those deaths in the United States, according to figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The Library records those terrible days in diaries, veterans oral histories, books, photographs, prints, newspaper stories and an array of other documents.

Tonight at 8 p.m. (ET) on the Library’s Facebook account, John M. Barry, a prizewinning historian of and author of “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History,” discusses the 1918 pandemic and what it can teach us about the coronavirus. He’ll be in conversation with David Rubenstein. The program will repeat this Saturday, April 11, at 3 p.m. (ET). The conversation will also be available on our YouTube channel and will be archived for viewing on Facebook, YouTube and the Library’s website.

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Alice Duffield. Veterans History Project.

It’s been a hundred years, but the immediacy of the documents in the Library’s collections can take the breath away. Alice L. Mikel Duffield served as a Captain in the Army Nurse Corps at Camp Pike, Arkansas, when influenza ravaged the place. The camp, a staging ground for soldiers both heading to the conflict and returning from it, sometimes held as many as 100,000 troops. At one point, there were so many bodies in the morgue, she told the Veterans History Project in 2002, that they couldn’t keep up with the living or the dead.

“You couldn’t find room in the morgue for all the patients,” she said, recounting an incident when a corpse fell on one orderly. “…We couldn’t possibly have had enough help with as many as were sick! It was just too many.”

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Red Cross nurse with a bus transport of patients, 1918 or 1919. Photo: Lewis Hine. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Library’s Red Cross collection documents how nurses were often on the front line of the battle against the disease. Nearly 24,000 Red Cross nurses enrolled for military service. After Germany surrendered on Nov. 11, 1918, the Red Cross continued working with the U.S. Public Health Service to provide nurses and motor corps workers until the pandemic receded in 1919.

Some of the pandemic’s overlap with World War I was presented in the Library’s “Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I” exhibit in 2017. The pandemic wasn’t started by the conflict but was spread by the vast movements of civilians and soldiers across continents.

One of those in transit was Dorothy Kitchen O’Neill. An American Red Cross volunteer, she sailed for Europe in October of 1918 — a month in which, incredibly, 195,000 Americans died of the flu. She and forty other women came down with influenza on the voyage. Four died. Dorothy wrote to her family on October 10, 1918: “Forty girls came down with the Influenza and if it had not been for the little unit of fifteen R.C. nurses — goodness knows what might have happened.” She continues: “I was down for a week and have only been up for two days so feel shaky.”

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Dorothy Kitchen O’Neill letter to her family. Manuscript Division. 

The Library’s Chronicling America archive captures newspapers of the day, far and wide, and how they reported life around them. In the summer of 1919, fearing a deadly relapse in the fall like the kind that had devastated the country the year before, thousands of people wrote to their congressional representatives, demanding action on a “flu bill.” On July 29, The Bismarck Tribune (Bismarck, North Dakota) urged its readers to join the letter-writing campaign in an article on the front page, above the fold. One of the leaders of the bill was U.S. Sen. Warren G. Harding (R-Ohio), who would be elected as president in 1920. He died of a heart attack on Aug. 2, 1923, while on a public speaking tour in San Francisco. He was 57 and had been suffering from pneumonia — often caused by the flu.

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Front page of The Bismarck Tribune, July 29, 1919. Chronicling America.

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