Sandra Opdycke, The Flu Epidemic of 1918

In 1976, the distinguished historian Alfred W. Crosby, already credited with writing the path-breaking Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, published another influential work, Epidemic and Peace, 1918.1 When the book was re-released years later, Crosby appropriately retitled the text America's Forgotten Pandemic, foregrounding one of the mysteries surrounding his subject, the 1918–19 outbreak of influenza that had raced around the globe, claiming perhaps 50 to 100 million lives. In the United States, over one-quarter of the population had been infected and some 675,000 had died, more than ten times the number of Americans killed in the First World War, with roughly half of those deaths occurring in just a six-week period. Yet for decades, as Crosby hailed with his new title, the outbreak had received little scholarly or popular attention. In recent years, though, study of the pandemic has flourished, attracting scholars from fields reaching from epidemiology and pathology to geography and anthropology. Historians, too, have explored the pandemic from a range of methodological and geographical perspectives, including a flurry of new work on the United States during the scourge. Combining an effective synthesis of this recent historiography with her own perceptive insights, Sandra Opdycke's The Flu Epidemic of 1918 is a welcome addition to this growing literature

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  Alfred W Crosby, Alfred W Jr Crosby•The Columbian exchange•2003

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