The Great Influenza

by John M. Barry, Amelia Pérez de Villlar, John M. Barry

John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza is an adult work of historical nonfiction—not fiction—that examines the 1918 influenza pandemic, the development of American medicine, and the scientists and public officials who confronted the crisis. Following figures such as William Henry Welch and researcher William Henry Park, Barry shows how wartime pressures, scientific uncertainty, and public communication shaped events; for grades 3–7, use carefully selected, teacher-mediated excerpts rather than assign the full book.

Big Idea

Scientific inquiry and trustworthy communication help communities respond to crises, especially when knowledge is incomplete. Studying how Barry alternates historical scenes with scientific explanations also shows students how nonfiction writers control pace without sacrificing accuracy.

Discussion Questions

1.How did wartime troop movements and crowded living conditions help influenza spread, and what does this reveal about connections between communities?
2.What do the scientists’ investigations show about the difference between having a reasonable idea and having enough evidence to support it?
3.Why might officials hesitate to share frightening information during a war? What could happen when reassuring messages do not match people’s experiences?
4.How does Barry help readers understand both the enormous scale of the pandemic and the experiences of individual people?
5.Where does an excerpt make you want to read quickly, and where does it ask you to slow down? How do those choices affect your understanding?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 50 minutes: introduction and reading, 15 minutes; timeline, 10 minutes; drafting, 12 minutes; peer review, 8 minutes; sharing and exit ticket, 5 minutes.📦 Teacher-selected excerpts or clearly labeled teacher-written adaptations, source-labeled event strips, paper, pencils, scissors, glue or tape, and colored pencils. Optional: a map of the United States and a document camera.

Learning Goals

Sequence at least four documented events and distinguish sequence from a proven cause.
Explain how sentence length, detail, and the balance of scene and summary influence reading pace.
Distinguish documented facts, uncertain historical claims, and invented material.
Revise a short nonfiction paragraph for a chosen pace while preserving accuracy.
Describe why clear communication matters during a public-health emergency.

Activity Steps

1.Prepare and introduce an age-appropriate excerpt set: Camp Funston and troop movements, Philadelphia’s Liberty Loan parade, and a passage about scientific investigation. Explain that the pandemic’s precise geographic origin remains disputed; an early outbreak in Kansas does not prove the virus originated there.
2.Read the excerpts aloud together. Mark documented events, identify unfamiliar terms, and discuss how scientists’ knowledge in 1918 differed from knowledge today.
3.In pairs, arrange four to six teacher-prepared event strips on a timeline. Add an evidence note to each strip and label relationships as 'happened before,' 'contributed to,' or 'uncertain' where appropriate.
4.Choose one event and write a brisk, three-sentence summary. Then write a slower, five- to seven-sentence account using only documented details; do not invent dialogue, thoughts, or sensory experiences.
5.Exchange drafts. Partners underline evidence-based details, circle pacing choices, and flag unsupported additions; writers revise one sentence to improve both clarity and accuracy.
6.Read contrasting versions aloud and complete an exit ticket: 'My pacing changed when I ____. One fact I kept accurate was ____.'

Standards Connections

CCSS ELA RI.4.3: Explain historical events, procedures, ideas, or concepts, including what happened and why, using specific information from a text.
CCSS ELA RI.6.3: Analyze how a key individual, event, or idea is introduced, illustrated, and elaborated in a text.
CCSS ELA W.4.2: Write informative/explanatory texts that examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly.
CCSS ELA W.6.5: Strengthen writing through planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach.
CCSS ELA SL.4.1: Participate effectively in collaborative discussions, building on others’ ideas and expressing ideas clearly. Select grade-equivalent standards for other classes.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

The Great Influenza demonstrates that nonfiction pacing involves more than making events move quickly. Barry moves among the development of American medicine, portraits of researchers such as William Henry Welch, explanations of disease, and the expanding emergency of 1918. A scientific explanation may slow the reading while making a later event more understandable; a compressed account of troop movements may make the pandemic’s reach feel rapid. Students can study these shifts in short, carefully chosen passages without reading the entire adult book. In a Pace-Write-Read workshop, students first notice how a passage moves, then write a fact-based variation, and finally read it aloud to test the effect. The central rule is that pace may change, but evidence may not: students should not invent conversations, private thoughts, or dramatic medical details. For grades 3–4, use brief, clearly labeled adaptations and shared writing; for grades 5–7, use supported original excerpts where suitable. Keep descriptions non-graphic, allow an alternative topic for students affected by illness or loss, and present uncertainty honestly—including uncertainty about the pandemic’s origin and mortality estimates.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	Compare an excerpt explaining medical research with one tracing the spread of influenza through military networks. Ask students how the amount of explanation, number of events, and sentence structure change the reading speed.
2. Plot	Treat the book’s narrative movement as a historical sequence, not an invented plot: medical preparation, an emerging emergency, investigation, and consequences. Track the outbreak and the scientific response on parallel timelines.
3. Prosody	Read a selected paragraph aloud twice, varying pauses and emphasis while keeping its words unchanged. Discuss how oral phrasing can clarify a scientific explanation or emphasize the urgency of a historical development.
4. Word	Examine terms such as 'influenza,' 'epidemic,' and 'pandemic,' noting where a technical word requires a reading pause. Build a small glossary and distinguish the influenza virus from bacteria investigated by researchers at the time.
5. Concept	Use the scientists’ investigations to explore the difference between a hypothesis and established knowledge. Notice how Barry must pause events to explain concepts readers need before the narrative can continue.
6. Voice & Worldview	Identify language that conveys Barry’s concern with scientific rigor, leadership, and honesty. Ask students to separate documented events from the author’s interpretation of their significance.
7. Point of View	Barry writes as a retrospective historian rather than as a fictional participant. Notice when his account moves from an individual researcher’s work to a broader view of institutions, cities, or wartime policy.
8. Setting & Place	Locate Camp Funston in Kansas, Philadelphia, and the medical institutions named in the selected excerpts. Discuss how barracks, laboratories, and crowded urban spaces create different conditions for both disease transmission and investigation.
9. Original Characters	The people in this book are historical individuals, not invented characters. Study how Barry makes William Henry Welch or William Henry Park distinctive through documented work, decisions, and professional challenges.
10. Dialogue	Where an excerpt contains quoted speech or correspondence, identify its attribution and check the source notes when available. If no dialogue appears, discuss why students must not invent a conversation to make the history more dramatic.
11. Details	Select details about troop transportation, laboratory work, or public gatherings that help explain events. Ask which details provide necessary evidence and which mainly slow the reader to emphasize importance.
12. Descriptions	Use a non-graphic passage describing a medical institution or working conditions. Notice how description creates context before the narrative returns to decisions and events.
13. Firsts	Track a first appearance within the narrative, such as an early reported outbreak or the introduction of a researcher. Distinguish 'first described here' from 'first ever': Kansas cases do not establish the pandemic’s geographic origin.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Examine how specific places, named people, and consequential decisions bring distant history close to readers. Create engagement through a documented choice, not through invented fear or graphic descriptions.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Mark passages that concentrate on a bounded event and passages that summarize developments across weeks or years. Discuss why Barry cannot give every event the same amount of space.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Explore the tension between urgent public needs and incomplete scientific knowledge. Even when readers know a pandemic occurred, uncertainty about what people could understand or accomplish can sustain interest.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Notice where the narrative moves into earlier medical history or looks toward later consequences. Label only devices actually present in the excerpt, and discuss how historical uncertainty can create suspense without fictional cliffhangers.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Inspect a chapter ending and the opening that follows in the available edition. Ask whether the break shifts time, location, individual focus, or the balance between scientific explanation and unfolding events.
19. Pace & Creativity	Have students reshape the same sourced facts about troop movements into a compact summary and an expanded explanation. Creativity lies in selecting, ordering, and connecting evidence—not adding undocumented events.
20. Play	Use low-stakes sentence-strip rearranging to explore emphasis and chronology. Keep play focused on writing choices rather than turning illness, transmission, or deaths into a game.
21. Performance	Invite students to perform a neutral nonfiction reading of a short excerpt about research or public communication. Use deliberate pauses and clear pronunciation rather than reenacting illness or impersonating grieving people.
22. Personality	Identify how documented habits, priorities, and professional choices help distinguish the researchers. Require evidence before describing a historical figure as persistent, cautious, ambitious, or confident.
23. Humor	Do not assume humor is a major feature of this serious history. Discuss why a writer might limit comic relief and why classroom humor should never target victims, communities, or medical suffering.
24. Pause	Find a place where Barry interrupts the movement of events to explain medicine or historical context. Ask what readers would misunderstand if that pause were removed.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Look for figurative language in a selected passage and distinguish it from literal scientific explanation. Discuss how a metaphor may sharpen an idea while also risking an inaccurate picture of how disease works.
26. Repetition	Track recurring concerns such as evidence, preparedness, and truthful communication. Ask how returning to an idea across different people or places builds an argument rather than merely repeating information.
27. Rhythm	Compare the spoken rhythm of an explanatory paragraph with a passage covering rapidly changing events. Mark sentence lengths and clause breaks before deciding which feels faster and why.
28. Punctuation	Examine how commas, dashes, semicolons, and periods organize a selected paragraph. Test a student-written version with different punctuation, ensuring that the factual relationships remain unchanged.
29. Questions	Frame research questions raised by the scientists’ work: What was causing influenza, and what evidence could test an explanation? Separate questions people could answer in 1918 from answers established later.
30. Compare-Contrast	Compare laboratory investigation with public-health decision-making during the emergency. A second option is to contrast reassuring public messages with documented local conditions, using specific evidence rather than broad judgments.
31. Objects	Choose a concrete object mentioned in the excerpt, such as laboratory equipment or transportation used by troops. Explain how that object connects individual actions to the book’s larger history.
32. Threes	If an excerpt contains a three-part sequence or list, examine its rhythm and emphasis. Otherwise, students can create a clearly labeled three-part synthesis—evidence, decision, consequence—without claiming Barry uses that pattern.
33. Lists	Study how an accumulation of locations, obstacles, or research tasks affects pace in the selected text. Students can convert a sourced list into prose and discuss which form best communicates scale.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Examine paragraph breaks and section spacing in the classroom edition. Discuss how a break gives readers time to process a shift, while recognizing that page layout may vary across editions and translations.
35. Art & Graphics	Inspect any photographs, maps, or other visuals actually present in the available edition; do not assume all editions include the same material. If none are available, create a source-based route map and distinguish student-added graphics from Barry’s text.
36. Interactives & Gamification	The book is not an interactive game, but students can sort evidence cards into event, explanation, and interpretation. Make success depend on sound reasoning and sourcing, never on competitive infection or death totals.
37. Placement	Ask why a scientific explanation or researcher’s background appears before a particular crisis episode. Experiment with moving a paragraph and explain what readers gain or lose.
38. Form	Identify the work as narrative history combining biography, scientific explanation, and historical argument. Contrast it with a novel or textbook, emphasizing that readable storytelling does not make it fiction.
39. Dummy	Create a four-panel paper mock-up of an informational spread: context, event, investigation, and reflection. Treat this 'dummy' as a planning tool for students’ adaptations, not as a feature of Barry’s original book.
40. Passion	Discuss how the book’s sustained attention to medicine and public communication reveals the author’s investment in the subject. Students choose one evidence-supported takeaway they care about and communicate it without exaggeration.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute Pace-Write-It! task: 'Philadelphia: Before and After.' Minutes 0–4: Read a brief, age-appropriate excerpt or clearly labeled adaptation about Philadelphia’s September 28, 1918, Liberty Loan parade and the influenza emergency that followed; identify three documented facts. Explain that the parade contributed to transmission but was not the sole cause of the city’s outbreak. Minutes 4–9: Write a brisk, three-sentence account that moves from the gathering to the subsequent public-health crisis. Minutes 9–15: Rewrite the same information in five or six sentences, slowing down to explain one documented decision or relevant condition; add no imagined dialogue, thoughts, or suffering. Minutes 15–18: Read both versions to a partner, who identifies one pacing change and checks that the facts remain consistent. Minutes 18–20: Revise and finish with: 'My faster version emphasizes ____, while my slower version helps explain ____.' For grades 3–4, use a shared fact bank and sentence frames; for grades 5–7, require a source reference and a sentence acknowledging the limits of the evidence.

Classroom Activities

Two Speeds, One True History

Students build a paper-strip timeline showing selected events from Barry’s account, then write two short treatments of the same documented moment: a brisk historical summary and a slower, detail-focused account. Using the movement of troops from Camp Funston in Kansas or the contrast between Philadelphia’s parade and subsequent public-health crisis, students explore how pacing changes emphasis while keeping facts unchanged. The activity avoids outbreak simulations, invented suffering, and fictional quotations.

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