Changes Prompted by 1918 Flu Pandemic

      The 1918 global flu pandemic, coming in the wake of WWI, was a travesty.  So many people were shaken by it, and by their responses (sometimes more selfish than they would have thought of themselves), as well as their survivors' guilt, that first-hand accounts of the flu largely disappeared.   

Seattle, Washington; 39th Infantry preparing for deployment to France

     However, the whole tragedy prompted some positive changes that stay with us.  Here is a slide show accounting of some of those changes:

Daily Mail: 10 Major Changes Resulting from the 1918 Flu Pandemic
 
     I was really surprised this event was given so much credit for countering "eugenics."  Eugenics was the study of how to arrange human reproduction to increase the passing down of "desirable" inherited characteristics. That meant so-called less-desirable people were forcibly sterilized (including in the U.S.) There were attempts to promote abortion more heavily among the poor. The 1918 pandemic helped people realize that the conditions of poverty, not personal "defects", allowed diseases to spread more rapidly among the poor.
     Francis Galton, an Englishman, was largely responsible for first developing this line of thinking.  In the U.S., Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, came to believe in eugenics.  (It's not true, however, that she did it for racially motivated reasons.)  In "The Eugenic Vale of Birth Control Propaganda" (1921), she wrote that "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective."  Eugenics was finally dealt its death blow after the Nazi's abhorrent use of it.

Juneteenth

"...I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free... In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed." --from "The Emancipation Proclamation", issued by President Abraham Lincoln & Secretary of State William Seward, Secretary of State, on 01 January 1863.

         Juneteenth is a blending of the words "June" and "nineteenth. It is the oldest known US celebration marking the ending of slavery. The day commemorates 19 June 1865, when Union MAJ General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and told the slaves that they had been "emancipated", or freed from slavery.

     "In accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free," Granger read and announced to the crowd that day. This proclamation came nearly two-and-a-half years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, as the reader can note here. In 1980, Texas was the first state to make it an official holiday, although it had been informally celebrated since 1865. It became a federal holiday in 2021.

Smithsonian African-American Musuem: The Historical Legacy of Juneteenth