My current book project, The Sword Outside, the Plague Within: How a Disillusioned Europe Survived the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, tells the story of the deadliest pandemic of the twentieth century through the words of the people who lived it. Its foundation is a collection of nearly 1,000 survivor testimonies from ten European countries. I photographed the collection in 2019 and, with the help of student researchers at Penn State and the University of Freiburg, built a searchable database and interactive map of the survivors. I supplemented this work with research in two dozen government, church, and local archives in Britain, Germany, France, and Switzerland.

The testimonies show a continent that met the flu already broken by war. Europeans had learned not to trust their newspapers or their governments, and many concluded that the disease was pneumonic plague, carried on the wind from the war front’s unburied dead. Laboratory scientists were chasing a bacillus, when the real killer was a virus no instrument could yet see. Ordinary people relied instead on knowledge of their own, fumigating their homes with tar and juniper rather than wearing masks. Strikingly, they did not blame minorities or foreigners. After four years of war, suffering seemed ambient and arbitrary: a matter of fate, not of enemies.

An article from the project, “A Provincial Pandemic,” appeared in Contemporary European History (2026) and received the Charles R. Bailey Memorial Prize from the New York State Association of European Historians. A second article, on the persistence of miasma theory during the pandemic, is under revision, and a third, on why so many Europeans understood the flu as pneumonic plague, is in progress.

The project has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Project House Europe at LMU-Munich, and the Penn State Humanities Institute.

For a discussion of the findings, listen to my interview on the Infectious Historians podcast (episode 114, August 25, 2023) on the IH website, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. A demonstration of the survivors’ map and database appears below.