After a year spent pouring over back issues of Ontario newspapers, two history students have uncovered new insights on old news.
Upon the recommendation history professor Aleksandra Bennett, Joseph Scanlon, professor emeritus and director of Carleton’s Emergency Communications Research Unit, enlisted Nicole Marion and Casey Hurrell in a study of the 1918-20 influenza pandemic.
The research team has sifted through obituaries and news reports from 1914-1918 in Kingston’s The Daily Standard and the St. Thomas Journal. Copies of the now defunct newspapers are preserved at the National Archives.
Initially, they recorded three categories under which fatalities were generally organized. These included the deaths of First World War soldiers, victims of the Spanish influenza and deaths by natural causes.
“In the process, we discovered a fourth category which we called graphic of lurid death,” said Scanlon. “It covers reports of suicides and industrial accidents which are reported in enormous detail.”
A former student of journalism, Marion said she was shocked at the reportage. “I found myself having to really set aside my biases based on what is acceptable news coverage today in order to properly study these reports.”
Among the details included in the newspapers, were the methods used to commit and motivations for suicides, along with the reactions of bystanders. Reportage of industrial or train accidents proved equally gruesome.
“Kingston was the community which seemed to have the greatest fascination with blood and gore,” said Hurrell. “In St. Thomas, though, whenever there were nasty train accidents – think decapitation that occurred when someone working inside a tunnel fell onto the train tracks, the St. Thomas Journal would cover everything in a lot more detail than you would normally see as a cause of death.”
Reports of deaths of soldiers stationed overseas also varied. Scanlon found that those who had died in battle were described in heroic terms, while many of those who had succumbed to the influenza merely died.
The project also revealed how the focus of these small Ontario communities changed between the pre-war and pandemic years and those that followed in a period of such massive fatalities.
Among the examples they found, was the temporary expropriation and conversion of the Kenora public library into an emergency hospital in the fall of 1918. Although recorded in the library’s own archives, the librarians had not been aware of the building’s use during the pandemic.
The newspaper study was the first phase of a three-year SSHRC-funded project that examines how three Canadian communities St. Thomas, Kingston and Kenora, dealt with death during the pandemic. Scanlon, Marion and Hurrell are currently searching for records from municipal governments, cemeteries, hospitals, museums and libraries within the three communities.
Next year, Scanlon will search Federal and Provincial archives for more records pertaining to volunteer work performed by women during the pandemic. Scanlon, accompanied by Marion and Hurrell, will present their initial research results at this year’s Congress of the Humanities.
Hurrell and Marion will be awarded honours degrees in History at convocation in June. This fall, Hurrell will pursue graduate work in the history of public health and epidemiology at Queen’s. Marion will attend the University of Ottawa to undertake a masters’ research paper on the Canadian peace movement in the inter-war period and the representation of the movement in Canadian newspapers.