John Eicher, associate professor of history at Penn State Altoona, published an article on the 1918 influenza pandemic in the journal Contemporary European History. The article concludes that the average Europeans who endured the 1918 influenza pandemic had no idea it was a pandemic in real time.
ALTOONA, Pa. — John Eicher, associate professor of history at Penn State Altoona, was selected as a resident scholar at the Penn State Humanities Institute for the 2025 spring semester.
As a Humanities Fellow, Eicher will continue to research and write his current project, “The Sword Outside, the Plague Within: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in Europe," which he began in 2019. "The Sword Outside" focuses on socio-cultural interpretations of the 1918 influenza pandemic via a collection of nearly 1,000 personal memories of the event gathered from across ten European countries.
