Podcasts and Pandemics: History students create ‘The Healthiest City’ podcast

A deadly virus swept through world, infecting and killing millions. People were required to wear masks and avoid mass gatherings, schools and businesses were temporarily shut down, and governments grappled with how best to address the pandemic.

But we’re not talking about COVID-19.

A little over 100 years ago, the Spanish Flu raced across the globe with such virulence that the pandemic still lives in collective memory. What’s interesting, said UWM assistant professor of history Christopher Cantwell, is that the disease changed, but between 1918 and 2020, the pandemic response hasn’t.

“In some ways, this is one of the few times that history literally repeated itself,” he said. “We have new technologies and better ways of caring for people who are sick. But the principles, the public health policies, and the problems are all the same.”

So, Cantwell and his students set out to explore that déjà vu. They did so in a 7-part podcast called, “The Healthiest City.”

Public history students in professor Christopher Cantwell’s “History and New Media” class created a podcast exploring Milwaukee’s response to another pandemic - that of the 1918 Spanish Flu. Image courtesy of “The Healthiest City” podcast.

Podcast pedagogy

During a normal academic year, Cantwell’s “History and New Media” class would have met in-person to explore new ways to present historical information with a focus on podcasting.

Of course, 2020 was anything but normal. For the safety of everyone during the coronavirus pandemic, UWM shifted most of its classes, including Cantwell’s, online.

“I knew this academic year would be a challenge in general,” he said. “So I asked myself, what can I do for my students to give them something real to point to at the end of it? I told them early on, rather than talk about podcasting, let’s just make a podcast.”

Podcasts are enjoying a hey-day at the moment, and high-quality podcasts rely on extensive research and clear, articulate writing to present stories and information – exactly the kind of skills Cantwell wants his students to develop in his class.

And learning about producing podcasts might just make his students more attractive when they hit the job market.

“Part of the goal for the class is to train students both in the tools and techniques of podcasting so they can develop these kinds of shows at the museums, libraries, or cultural centers they may end up in. That is a skill set they can bring with them,” he said.

Christopher Cantwell

“The Healthiest City”

The podcast is produced in partnership with the Milwaukee County Historical Society, which provided Cantwell’s students with access to its historical archives for research. Episodes span a variety of topics, from the history of Milwaukee’s public health to how schools and hospitals responded. Each starts out with a focus on a particular aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic – an interview with a Columbia St. Mary’s ICU nurse to talk about health care, for example, or a narrative from a Milwaukee Public Schools teacher to talk about the pandemic’s impact on education – before pulling back to examine a similar aspect from 1918.

The podcast pulls its name from a book by historian Judith Leavitt. The book outlines the history of public health in Milwaukee, including how the city so deftly navigated the 1918 pandemic that it had the secondlowest rate of infection in the nation despite its dense population – thus earning the “Healthiest City” designation.

“We panicked a bit at first. Milwaukee did really well during the 1918 Flu. That doesn’t lend itself to a dramatic story on audio,” Cantwell recalled. “It was like, ‘They closed the city, everybody followed the rules, and everything was fine!’ That’s not a good story.”

So, the podcast starts the narrative a bit earlier. Almost 30 years before the Flu, Milwaukee’s health department badly bungled its response to a smallpox outbreak in 1894 to the point that mothers led riots in the street as health officials forcibly removed their children for quarantine. The next time a sickness hit, Cantwell said, Milwaukee’s then-Socialist city government remembered the lessons from 1894.

“Wearing masks, closing large spaces of gatherings – those were the policies implemented in 1918 and those are the policies that work today,” Cantwell added. “I think one major difference between then and now is that there was a radically different understanding of what government can do and what government is for. When the city shut things down, people by and large, at least in Milwaukee, followed the rules.”

‘History in your pocket’

The Spanish Flu arrived in Milwaukee in the body of one Vernon Stacy. Christina Grev tracked him like a detective through history.

“I’m very hesitant to call him ‘Patient 0;’ the Flu could have already been here in Milwaukee,” she hedged. “(But) he was the first recorded patient.”

Grev is a public history graduate student and co-produced Episodes 3 and 5 of “The Healthiest City.” While she’s always been a fan of podcasts, this is the first time she’s ever made one. She cobbled together her own recording studio by draping sound-dampening blankets around her mattress and crawling beneath her bed with a computer and a microphone.

Christina Grev

Podcasting was a fun challenge, especially when it came to research. Episode 3, co-produced by graduate student Katie Bischof, centers on how the Spanish Influenza spread through the world and eventually made its way to Milwaukee via Stacy, a lieutenant stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Station in northern Illinois.

Grev worked backward from his arrival in Milwaukee to track his movements and the spread of the Flu. She stumbled onto a treasure trove of information in the Naval Base’s old bulletins, archived online.

In those papers, she found the first report of an outbreak at the station. “The first couple of patients with the Flu (recorded in Milwaukee) came from that base,” she added.

Grev and Bischof also pulled in medical historian Micaela Sullivan-Fowler at UW-Madison for a Zoom interview to get her expertise. “She was the glue that put all of our stories together,” Grev recalled.

In fact, Cantwell said, one side effect of the class’ virtual environment was that students were eager Christina Grev to interview experts that they might never have thought to contact otherwise.

“They interviewed an author (on the west coast) who wrote an article about Milwaukee bars during the pandemic. They said, hey, can we call you and interview you? The virtual format allowed us to expand the scope of who to talk to, because everybody is a Zoom call away right now,” he said.

Grev is proud of the finished product, and grateful to both learn about podcasting and about public health in the city.

“We’re reliving history in a way,” she said, echoing Cantwell. “Things have changed, but not that much. I loved this class. I think my classmates did a fantastic job.”

And with the podcast available in so many places, she added, “It’s like having a piece of history in your pocket.”

By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science

A brief history of the Spanish Flu

The influenza virus has been around as long as there have been people to catch it, but the strain in 1918 was particularly deadly. The most prevalent origin theory suggests that the Spanish Flu is not Spanish at all, but instead jumped from birds to humans near a military training base in Kansas.

U.S. troops carried the virus from Kansas to the front lines of World War I in Europe, and then brought it back to America when they returned home from the fighting. In all, the Flu claimed about 50 million lives world-wide.

“It gets to Milwaukee in September of 1918 through January of 1919. Around 1,100 people died and 30,000 people got it,” Cantwell said. “Schools were shut down for five weeks over the span of a couple of months in two separate shut-downs.”

The pandemic left its mark on history, but it’s far from being stuck in the past.

“You can draw a straight line from the Spanish Influenza to the flu vaccine that we get every year,” Cantwell said. “That history is still around us.”