An early map of both Samoa and American Samoa, created by George F. Cram at the turn of the 20th century. At the time, Samoa was controlled by Germany, but eventually fell into the control of New Zealand before going independent. via Wikimedia Commons

The Spanish Flu Outbreak of 1918: A Tale of Two Samoas

How quick thinking by a U.S. official saved thousands of lives from disease in an American territory — despite its non-American counterpart being decimated.

This piece is adapted from a recent piece of Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet. Here’s the original version.

For understandable reasons, Puerto Rico is perhaps the main U.S. territory on the minds of the American public at the moment. The island of 3.5 million has been utterly devastated by Hurricane Maria and it will likely be years before it’s back to a semblance of its normal self — a situation not being helped, to say the least, by the current president.

Tedium, of course, isn’t a news blog, but sometimes it helps to take news and highlight it through the frame of history.

With that in mind, I’d like to spend a moment discussing a time that quick thinking and coordination saved a lot of lives on a U.S. territory. The territory? American Samoa, one of just two territories south of the equator. (The other, Jarvis Island, is a guano acquisition.)

Almost exactly 100 years ago, the Pacific Ocean-based territory had been informed of the Spanish flu pandemic that was then circling the globe…