For a long time, they emerged in a very slow trickle. And the Spanish flu is exactly a warning for that.”īeiner began collecting books about the 1918 pandemic 20 years ago. We believe that if an event is historically significant-if it affects many, many people, if it changes the fate of countries in the world, if many people die from it-then it will inevitably be remembered,” he says. That such a devastating pandemic could become so dormant in our collective memory puzzled Guy Beiner, a historian at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, prompting him to spend decades researching its legacy. But the event seems to form a disproportionately small part of our society’s narrative of its past. Of course, the pandemic was not forgotten entirely: many today are aware it occurred or even know of ancestors who succumbed to it. But the same cannot be said for the 1918 flu (often referred to as the “Spanish flu” because of mistaken beliefs about its origin). Many popular museums and blockbuster movies recount the sinking of the Titanic and the Apollo moon missions. Monuments and federal holidays commemorate people lost in both World Wars. Until quite recently, the pandemic had remained strangely faint in the public sphere, compared with other momentous events of the 20th century. And many history textbooks in subsequent decades just note the 1918–1919 flu pandemic as an aside when discussing World War I, if at all. But the book’s sprawling 1,300 pages never mention the catastrophic influenza pandemic that had killed between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide only five years earlier. More than 80 authors-professors and politicians, soldiers and scientists-contributed chapters to These Eventful Years: The Twentieth Century in the Making as Told by Many of Its Makers. In 1924 Encyclopædia Britannica published a two-volume history of the 20th century thus far.

Pale rider the spanish flu of 1918