The Underground Workshop, VTDigger’s platform for student journalism, aims to publish a wide range of student work, including local history. This winter, in partnership with the Vermont Historical Society and in support of National History Day, we invite students to contribute original research to the history of Vermont’s last pandemic, in 1918.
The project is best suited for high school students learning to work with primary sources, but it’s open to any student in grades 7-12 who can meet a rigorous standard for published writing.
This post contains:
- Our Pandemic Media, an overview of the project, and
- The Future in Two Postcards, a short reading for context
The Project: Our Pandemic Media, 1918
The theme for this year’s National History Day, “Communication: The Key To Understanding,” is never more relevant than in times of crisis. Historians looking back at 2020 will remember the mask mandate, remote learning, Governor Scott’s press conferences — efforts to communicate, to adapt, to coordinate a response.
This focus on communication (“how words, thoughts, or ideas are exchanged”) is also the key to any project of social history, seeking to understand the past through the experiences of ordinary people. If future historians could scroll back through our internet activity — our texts, social media and games; our Netflix, Amazon and Zoom — they could explore questions that push beyond the 2020 headlines:
What were Vermonters’ day-to-day concerns? What did they know and believe? How did their values and attitudes shape their responses in the pandemic? How were their ideals challenged or changed?
VTDigger’s History Invitational poses these questions about Vermonters’ experience during our last pandemic, the influenza of 1918. This project is an opportunity for students to contribute original research to the social history of a particular moment in Vermont — as we grapple with our own pandemic, we’re asking: Who were we, the last time this happened?
We invite students to submit short articles (400-800 words) that tell the story behind a single artifact or primary source (an advertisement, news article, song, etc.) related to the public exchange of “words, thoughts or ideas” during the influenza pandemic in Vermont, in the fall of 1918 and winter of 1919.
Vermont’s newspapers of the time provide a vivid window into the moment, and thousands of opportunities for this project. For example, just before the pandemic arrived in Barre, in early September, 1918, the Barre Daily Times printed a long-form, article-like advertisement (a typical form for the time) for “Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills,” a tonic said to help people recover from diseases, including the influenza.
A student researching the back story for this product could learn a lot about popular beliefs and practices surrounding medical treatment at the time, etc, and also tell an interesting story for a general reader– for starters, who was Dr. Williams?
A student’s chosen primary source does not need to tie directly to the influenza, so long as it can be used to tell an interesting story about the public exchange of “words, thoughts or ideas” in Vermont during the pandemic in the fall of 1918. World War One was the dominant media event of the moment, for example, and can’t be separated from Vermonters’ experience of the pandemic. The image below, from December, 1918, just after the end of the war, is part of a large advertisement for the U.S. government’s drive to send food aid to Europe in the war’s aftermath.
If we’re interested to learn about American values in 1918, we can learn a lot from this ad (and the drive’s success: Americans sent 34 million tons of food and supplies).
Neither of these ads were specific to Vermont, but they were still part of Vermonters’ media landscape, reprinted in many of the state’s newspapers, in Vermont. There are also lots of opportunities to look at media produced by Vermonters. The same edition of the Manchester Journal devoted the entire front page to letters from local soldiers, for example, and every local paper from the time includes news articles, editorials, advertisements for local businesses, etc.
The newspapers are a vast resource, and convenient for research during remote learning, but students might also connect with their local historical society to learn about events in their town. Other types of artifacts might be available. For example, town health officers posted quarantine cards on the houses of families sick with influenza. It’s not clear any of these are still around, but what a contrast to our own notions of medical privacy in 2020!
The Underground Workshop will publish the students’ articles together under the title “Our Pandemic Media” in late March, in conjunction with the Vermont Historical Society’s events for History Day. We hope this collection will in turn become a resource for Vermont’s history teachers, to engage their classes with this chapter of our history. A.P. U.S. history teachers might use this collection for a “Document Based Question,” for example.
Submissions are due by March 10. We are seeking concise, engaging pieces of popular history — longer, academic versions of these articles could be adapted as papers for History Day. Students and teachers can read more about the assignment here:
Those interested to participate should email ben@vtdigger.
For background reading on the pandemic in Vermont, students could read Mark Bushnell’s excellent column in VTDigger. The Vermont Historical Society’s page on the pandemic also includes some powerful oral histories.
And for more information about the Vermont Historical Society’s events for History Day and opportunities for students:
The Future in Two Postcards
Framing the theme for National History Day,”Communication, the Key to Understanding,” in the context of small town Vermont, a century ago.
Among the images available through UVM’s Landscape Change Program is a postcard from around 1910, a doctored photograph imagining “Hardwick, Vt., in the Future.” Three varieties of dirigible hover over an elevated train as it departs for Boston, while a sightseeing bus and a trolley pass by the street-level entrance to Hardwick’s subway to New York City.
check out these views of White River Junction and Cabot.
Vermonters who know Hardwick will laugh: As it turns out, the village looks about the same as when the postcard was made, more than a century ago.
But how was the postcard seen in its own time? It was certainly a novelty item, good for a chuckle, but inside the joke there was likely a real sense of exhilaration about the future.
The postcard was produced by E.H. Campbell, a Hardwick businessman who ran a store and hotel on Main Street. Over the years he sold everything from coal to ribbon candy, from electric washing machines to imported scallops.
By 1900 the expanding railroad network had swept rural Vermont into the fast-changing marketplace and culture of modern America. The scallops probably arrived by refrigerated train car from Boston, while the washing machines traveled east from Midwestern factories. Hardwick became a granite town, exporting stone across the country. It was a moment of rapid, accelerating change.
Of course, Vermont lagged behind New York City, which opened its first subway tunnels in 1904, but by 1910 many of our larger towns did have electric trolleys like the one in the postcard, and by 1915 Vermonters could watch the future overtake the past in real time, as automobiles passed horses on the roads.
In this context, it made sense for the postcard to picture the future in terms of blimps and subways: New modes of transportation were the most visible advances then underway. But as revolutionary as these technologies were, by 1920 their potential to transform daily life had mostly come into view. Vermonters still rely on the internal combustion engine today, to carry us over the same back roads.
The postcard above, an earlier view of Main Street from the same vantage point, required no embellishment to predict the real future, the one in which we actually live. We know, because the Hardwick Inn is missing from the right side of Main Street, that the photograph dates from sometime before 1876. This was before the automobile or the lightbulb, but one modern technology does appear: the telegraph.
Telegraph lines spread across America in the second half of the 19th century, running alongside the railroad tracks. They coordinated the trains, but they also had a larger, radical impact, transmitting electrical signals over thousands of miles in a few seconds. Hardwick’s granite firms could negotiate with far-off customers in real time. A soldier could send a telegram (like an expensive text message) home to his family. The telegraph was the original telecommunications network, the foundation for the wired world we live in today.
These postcards remind us to be humble about our predictions. People in Hardwick still can’t take the subway to New York City (not even close!), but if their internet is decent, they can join a meeting anywhere in the world from the comfort of their couch. As it turns out, the most profound changes of the past century were less about the movement of people than the movement of information.
The small town paper: Our window into their world
A note on the recommended sources for students pursuing this project.
Just as the railroad and telegraph transformed the rural economy, they also transformed Vermonters’ media landscape, as many small towns become prosperous and well-connected enough to support their own newspaper.
The Hardwick Gazette is just background scenery in the futuristic postcard — its roof is barely visible a couple of doors down from the subway entrance on the right — but it proved more essential for the town than any trolley or blimp might have been. The Gazette was founded in 1889, and in 1908 moved to its new headquarters, with its front door open to Main Street and its backside suspended over the Lamoille River, where it still produces an edition each week.
Looking back from the cluttered media landscape of 2021, it’s hard to imagine the status small town papers once enjoyed. The Gazette wasn’t the only media available in Hardwick a century ago — people subscribed to a variety of magazines, catalogues and other publications — but it was their shared source for essential information. The local paper didn’t just keep individual readers informed; it helped to sustain the community’s sense of common identity and culture. It was not so easy for neighbors each to choose their own worldview, as it is today on the internet.
As such, small-town newspapers like the Gazette are among the most comprehensive primary sources available to historians. Each page is a vivid window into many facets of its readers’ collective experience: their working and social lives, their consumer behavior, their values and attitudes, their discussions and debates.
Small papers like the Hardwick Gazette were the source for all kinds of information: news from the war, the latest legislation from the Statehouse in Montpelier, popular stories and columns reprinted from across the country, and most of all, small town news– people were interested in the guests who came to the hotel, the goings-on in their neighboring towns. For local businesses, the small town paper was the essential venue for advertising–a historian can get a pretty clear picture of Hardwick’s economy from any edition of the Gazette.
1918, the moment of our last pandemic, was near the end of the small newspapers’ most dominant period. Newsreels already played in the larger towns’ theaters, and when radio arrived in the 1920’s Vermonters had access to another world of information. But in 1918, the newspaper still reigned supreme.
Many of these newspapers are available through the Library of Congress, on the Chronicling America database, and through subscription services like Newspapers.com. Learn more about how to search these databases for free here.
The key to this kind of research is curiosity and patience. Take the time to read, and soon enough an image of the past will emerge, more vivid than any postcard.
Support for this project is available. Students or teachers can email ben@vtdigger with questions, to schedule a classroom visit, etc.
