Pandemic on the Prairie
Episodes
7 episodes
A Tale of Two Kansas Cities
The invisible line that runs through the middle of Kansas City may be an important political boundary, but in 1918, like today, diseases do not respect these human divides. This episode compares the Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO responses...
Samuel Crumbine, Public Health Pioneer
Samuel Crumbine was a physician and public health pioneer known throughout Kansas and the nation for his evidence-based methods of promoting food safety, sanitation, and combating communicable diseases. Many Kansans may still tread on his “Don’...
Mini-episode: A History of the Haskell Institute
Kansas is home to Haskell Indian Nations University, today the premier institution of higher education for Native Americans in the United States. However, Haskell has a long and complicated history, including experiencing two deadly outbreaks o...
The Other Haskell
Just weeks after the March 1918 “first wave” flu outbreak at Camp Funston, the Haskell Institute in Lawrence saw a similar rash of influenza infections. Around one-third of the Native American students were hospitalized, and 17 died. In this ep...
Mini-Episode: Dr. Loring Miner
In this mini-episode, we tell the story of Dr. Loring Miner, a physician in Haskell County in southwest Kansas who, in early 1918, may have encountered the first outbreak of the flu pandemic. Dr. Miner was a little different than the stereotypi...
The Kansas Flu?
Did the deadly 1918-1920 influenza pandemic begin in Kansas? While this pandemic is often called the “Spanish flu”, there is a strong possibility it originated in Camp Funston, a training camp for WWI recruits at Fort Riley. We will follow the ...
Introducing Pandemic on the Prairie
Welcome to Pandemic on the Prairie, a podcast about the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic in Kansas and what local stories tell us about the American experience more broadly. But before we explore local stories, for this episode we zoom out and get ...