Pandemics

The invention of the modern mumps vaccine is the stuff of medical textbook legend. In 1963, a star researcher at the pharmaceutical company Merck took a swab of his own daughter’s throat to begin cultivating a weakened form of the mumps virus. And just four years later, in record ...read more

During the hot, humid summer of 1793, thousands of Philadelphians got horribly sick, suffering from fevers and chills, jaundiced skin, stomach pains and vomit tinged black with blood. By the end of August, as more and more people began dying from this mysterious affliction, ...read more

“Spanish flu” has been used to describe the flu pandemic of 1918 and 1919 and the name suggests the outbreak started in Spain. But the term is actually a misnomer and points to a key fact: nations involved in World War I didn’t accurately report their flu outbreaks.  Spain ...read more

In the summer of 1945, as World War II drew to a close, the U.S. economy was poised on the edge of an uncertain future. Since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s call in late 1940 for the United States to serve as the “arsenal of democracy,” American industry had stepped up to meet ...read more

When George Washington took command of the Continental Army in 1775, America was fighting a war on two fronts: one for independence from the British, and a second for survival against smallpox. Because Washington knew the ravages of the disease firsthand, he understood that the ...read more

The influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919 was the most deadly flu outbreak in history, killing up to 50 million people worldwide. In the United States, where it ultimately killed around 675,000 people, local governments rolled out initiatives to try to stop its spread. These varied ...read more

When influenza began to sweep through the U.S. in 1918, a frightened nation looked to an unproven but familiar remedy: whiskey. There was just one problem. More than half the states had passed Prohibition laws by then, making liquor difficult, sometimes impossible, to legally ...read more

A recession is defined as a contraction in economic growth lasting two quarters or more as measured by the gross domestic product (GDP). Starting with an eight-month slump in 1945, the U.S. economy has weathered 12 different recessions since World War II. On average, America’s ...read more

Cholera tore through New York City in the summer of 1832, leaving its victims with sunken eyes, blue skin, severe diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. It had swept from its origin in Asia and then made its way across Europe before arriving at New York’s shores. It only took a matter of ...read more

The unprecedented death and destruction wrought by World War I leveled economies the world over, but the situation was different in the United States. In fact, 1914 to 1918 were mostly boom years for the U.S. as the federal government poured money into the wartime economy. ...read more

The Silk Road, a network of land and sea trade routes that connected China and the Far East with Europe from 130 B.C. to 1453 A.D., became a vital source for everything from fabric and leather goods to spices and precious stones. It connected communities and allowed them to share ...read more

In the fall of 1918, the United States was approaching a midterm election like none other before. Not only were President Woodrow Wilson and his fellow Democrats trying to keep control of Congress during the home stretch of World War I—they were trying to do so in the middle of ...read more

When the influenza pandemic hit the U.S. between 1918 and 1920, Americans wanted answers. Their questions weren’t limited to what caused the pandemic or might prevent the next one. They struggled with more eternal concerns, such as what happens to us after we die and whether it’s ...read more

Nearly 700 years after the Black Death swept through Europe, it still haunts the world as the worst-case scenario for an epidemic. Called the Great Mortality as it caused its devastation, this second great pandemic of Bubonic Plague became known as the Black Death in the late ...read more

At the onset of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, store shelves were quickly emptied of toilet paper, revealing the commodity’s prominent, yet unspoken role in modern-day society. Although humans have cleaned their bottoms for as long as they have walked the Earth, “three-ply” and ...read more

Lashed by a squall of historical events over four harrowing years, exhausted Americans longed to catch their collective breath as Election Day approached. The four years leading up to the presidential election of 1920 had delivered a ghastly confluence of war, pestilence, ...read more

Throughout millennia, people have fostered some pretty irrational ideas about how infectious diseases such as plague and cholera were spread. Some of those notions—like the idea that the ancient Cyprian plague could be caught simply by staring into the face of someone ...read more

The plague ravaged large cities and provincial towns in northern and central Italy from 1629 to 1631, killing more than 45,000 people in Venice alone and wiping out more than half the population of cities like Parma and Verona. But strikingly, some communities were spared. In ...read more