ALTOONA, Pa. — John Eicher, associate professor of history at Penn State Altoona, won the triennial Charles R. Bailey Memorial Prize from the New York State Association of European Historians for his article “A Provincial Pandemic: European Ignorance of the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Influenza as a Shared Event,” published in Contemporary European History.
The competition drew more than 50 submissions. The prize committee praised the quality of Eicher’s research, calling the article “a piece of scholarship that is simply outstanding.”
The article argues that the 1918 flu moved so fast, and Europeans were so worn down by war and so poorly served by their newspapers and doctors, that most experienced the deadliest pandemic in modern history as a local emergency, never grasping that it was a global one.
Eicher’s research draws on the Richard Collier collection at the Imperial War Museum in London, roughly 1,000 survivor testimonies gathered from 10 European countries in the early 1970s. Eicher photographed and organized the collection in 2019 and then built the first searchable database of its contents with a team of student researchers from Penn State Altoona and the University of Freiburg (Germany).
He is currently working on a book based on the archive, “The Sword Outside, the Plague Within,” which follows ordinary Europeans through the pandemic year.