Pandemic Re-Awakenings

A multi-level and multi-faceted exploration of a century of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, arguably the greatest catastrophe in human history. Twenty-three researchers chart the worldwide historiographical neglect and silences, and trace vestiges of social and cultural memories of this pandemic.

Guy Beiner is a professor of modern history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev who specializes in the history of remembering and forgetting. He holds a PhD from the National University of Ireland and was a Government of Ireland Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, as well as a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, a Government of Hungary Scholar at the Central European University, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Burns Scholar at Boston College. His books on social memory/forgetting and folk history have won multiple international awards.

Preface: History, Memory, and the Flu
Introduction: The Great Flu between Remembering and Forgetting
PART I: PERSONAL HISTORIES
1: Hannah Mawdsley: Remembering the 'Forgotten' Pandemic: Richard Collier's Collection of Personal Testimonies
2: David Killingray: Burdens of Grief and Fractured Communities: Personal Memories and Communal Responses to the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19 in Non-Literate Societies
3: Howard Phillips: The Silence of the Survivors: Why Did South African Survivors of the 'Spanish' Flu Epidemic Not Talk About It?
4: Claudio Bertolli Filho: 'Above all else there was fear': Recollections of the 'Spanish' Flu in São Paulo, Brazil
5: Ida Milne: Changing Narratives of 'That' Pandemic: Re-Engaging with Oral Histories for the Centenary of the Great Flu in Ireland
PART II: COMMUNAL HISTORIES
6: Lukasz Mieszkowski: The Overshadowing of the Memory of 'Spanish' Flu in Poland
7: Utz Thimm: 'When two crises meet each other': Remembering 'Spanish' Flu in the Low Countries
8: Kandace Bogaert with Mark Humphries: 'Remember me to the folks': The Great War and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in Canada
9: Geoffrey W. Rice: 'The Fell Plague of Last Year': Remembering and Forgetting the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand
10: David Arnold: Representation and Remembrance: The 1918-19 Influenza Epidemic in India
11: Peter Hobbins: 'The pneumonic influenza is just part of my life': Fostering Community Histories of the 'Spanish' Influenza Pandemic in Australia
PART III: MEDICAL HISTORIES
12: Mark Honigsbaum: Pandemic Exchanges: Narrating the 'Spanish' Flu at the Intersection of Science and History
13: Jeffrey S. Reznick: The Past, Present, and Future of Memory: Medical Histories of the 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic in the United States
14: E. Thomas Ewing: The 'Ispanka' in Historical Context: The 1918 Influenza Epidemic in the Soviet Union
15: Robert Peckham: 'Huge but Unknown': China in the Memory of the 1918-19 Influenza Pandemic
PART IV: CULTURAL HISTORIES
16: Samuel Kline Cohn, Jr.: Pandemics and Comparative Forgetfulness: The Great Influenza and the Black Death
17: Steffen Bruendel: Between the Great War and the Great Flu: The 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic and the Contemporary Avant-Garde
18: Cynthia Gabbay: Traces in the Archive of a Great Oblivion: Ibero-American Representations of the 'Spanish' Flu
19: Nancy K. Bristow: The Practices of Social Forgetting: Rewriting, Obscuring, and Silencing the 1918 Influenza Epidemic in the United States
Conclusion: Rediscovering the Great Flu, between Pre-forgetting and Post-forgetting
Afterword: The Great Flu and Modern Memory