History: U-M Medical Historians Launch Digital Influenza Archives

From the University of Michigan Health System:

The University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine, in partnership with the U-M Library’s MPublishing division, announces the release of The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919: A Digital Encyclopedia, an original, open access digital collection of archival, primary, and interpretive materials related to the history of the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic in the United States.

The collection, located at www.influenzaarchive.org, contains more than 16,000 digitized documents—correspondence, minutes of organization and group meetings, reports from agencies and charities, newspaper accounts, military records, diaries, photographs, and more—along with interpretive materials contributed by scholars of history and public health.

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The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919: A Digital Encyclopedia is original in three significant ways:

• It is the first digital collection to document the social, cultural, public health, and human dimensions of the most devastating infectious health crisis to occur in the world during the post-germ theory era;
• It is the first extensive digital collection to highlight the responses of more than 50 differing American communities to the 1918-1919 epidemic, with attention to multiple social forces, organizations, communities and to the human experiences of death and disease;
• It provides access to an extensive set of interpretative documents, including city essays, timelines, information boxes, and sidebars