Laura Spinney, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” (PublicAffairs, 2017)

Laura Spinney, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu o...

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Magdalena E. Stawkowski, "Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, Kazakhstan inherited the remnants of one of the world's most contaminated landscapes: the Semipalatinsk Test Site, known locally as the Polygon. Resigned to dispossession, residents have chosen to remain on the abandoned nuclear te ...  Show more

Devin Kennedy, "Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy" (Columbia UP, 2026)

Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated, and how businesses became big. After World War II, military officials and their partners in industry looked to the newly invented electronic computer as they sought to cu ...  Show more

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The Spanish Flu of 1918
Radio Davos

It infected one-third of the world's population and killed 50 million people, but for most of us the Spanish Flu is little more than a footnote of history. Author and science journalist Laura Spinney tells us what we have still to learn from from the 20th Century's worst pande ...

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Lessons from the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic
Front Burner

The influenza outbreak of 1918 was the deadliest pandemic in recent history, killing an estimated 50 million to 100 million people aroundthe world. And it bears some striking similarities to the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, Laura Spinney, science journalist and author of Pale Rider: ...  Show more

The Spanish Flu
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The influenza pandemic of 1918-20 infected about one-third of the world’s population at the time, killing at least 50 million people. Occurring during the First World War, what became known as the Spanish Flu spread rapidly as soldiers moved across continents. It overwhelmed hosp ...  Show more

The Deadliest Pandemic in Modern History
HISTORY This Week

April 5, 1918. The first mention of a new influenza outbreak in Kansas appears in a public health report. That strain, later called the Spanish Flu, would go on to kill at least 50 million people worldwide. In a time before widespread global travel, how did this disease spread so ...  Show more