View interactive maps of Florida’s flu mortality during the 1918 flu pandemic.

Welcome

This digital history project fuses historical analysis and data visualization to better understand the impact of the 1918 flu in Florida, comparing white and African American flu mortality in fifty-four Florida counties between September and December 1918.

This project shows that African Americans were twice as likely to die of the flu as whites and suffered a mortality rate two to five times the white rate in seventy-six percent of Florida counties in 1918.

We created the maps in Dr. Scot French’s HIS 6165 “Digital Tools for Historians” graduate course at the University of Central Florida’s History Department in Fall 2019 and site in Summer 2020. As of Summer 2023, the site is expanding to support a catalog of primary sources and articles on cities.

  • Maps

    These interactive maps visualize 1918 flu mortality data for whites and African Americans in Florida.

    Maps

  • Sources

    These primary sources add context to the maps and statistics.

    Sources

  • Cities

    Cities in Florida experienced the flu differently. These articles tell their stories.

    Cities

What was the 1918 flu?