Spread from Urban to Rural: 1918 Influenza Epidemic in Sonoma County

Student: Serena Chan

Faculty Mentor: Benjamin Smith

Human Development

College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts

The 1918 influenza epidemic had catastrophic effects all over the United States, where even rural towns were not safe from it, which brings attention to how that might have happened to Sonoma County and its cultural impacts from the epidemic. This poster presentation is looking at how the flu spread from urbanized settings to rural settings with the framing of Sonoma County compared to the neighboring city of San Francisco. San Francisco was one of the cities that was hit the hardest during the epidemic in California, as it became a center of the epidemic, including naval bases like Vallejo that are in reach of San Francisco. The poster aims to provide an epidemiological look into how the Spanish flu reached Sonoma County and the impacts the flu had within the cultural perspective through the use of newspaper archives, archival books, and academic papers.