Episode 5 | The 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Welcome to a new season of the C13Originals critically acclaimed Hope, Through History documentary limited series. Narrated and written by Pulitzer Prize Winning and Best Selling Historian Jon Meacham, Season Two explores some of the most historic and trying times in American History, how this nation dealt with the impact of these moments, and how we came through these moments a more unified nation. Season Two, presented by C13Originals, in association with The HISTORY® Channel, will guide you through the Battle of Gettysburg and its impact on the future of the country, the relationship between FDR and Churchill and America’s slow walk to war, the plan for AIDS relief, the sinking of the Lusitania and events impact on the future of America, and Bloody Sunday and the Voting Rights Act. This follows Season One which covered the 1918 Flu Pandemic, the Great Depression, World War II, the polio epidemic and the Cuban Missile Crisis. These stories of crisis—the term originates in the writings of Hippocrates, as a moment in the course of a disease where a patient either lives or dies—are rich, and in our own 2021 hour of coming out of the devastating pandemic and slow-motion but indisputably real panic, there’s utility in re-engaging with the stories of how leaders and citizens have reacted amid tension and tumult. The vicissitudes of history always challenge us in new and often-confounding ways; that’s in the nature of things. Still, as Winston Churchill once remarked, “The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope”—the hope that human ingenuity, reason, and character can combine to save us from the abyss and keep us on a path, in another phrase of Churchill’s, to broad, sun-lit uplands.