"It was left to the environmental historian Alfred Crosby in his 1976 book Epidemic and Peace to place the pandemic in the context of other great scourges of the past, such as the Black Death, which killed an estimated 40-70m in the middle decades of the 14th century.
Crosby
Crosby
was also the first to argue that the pandemic had had a significant impact on history by sickening the US president, Woodrow Wilson, at a critical juncture of the Versailles peace negotiations in Paris in April 1919. The result was that the American delegation acceded to
French president George Clemenceau’s demands that the Germans pay harsh reparations, sowing the seeds, claimed Crosby, for the rise of Nazism and the second great conflict of the 20th century.
Anything but forgotten
However, Crosby’s book made little impact until 1989 when,
Anything but forgotten
However, Crosby’s book made little impact until 1989 when,
in the wake of the AIDS pandemic, his publishers reissued it under the new title of America’s Forgotten Pandemic. The sobriquet struck a chord, prompting historians from other countries to pen similar accounts recalling the impact of the “forgotten pandemic” on Britain,
Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Spain."
Why historians ignored the Spanish flu via @ConversationUKtheconversation.com/why-historians…
Why historians ignored the Spanish flu via @ConversationUKtheconversation.com/why-historians…
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