evidence: The answer is not straightforward. Historian Alfred Crosby’s important account of the United States’ experience of the pandemic, America’s Forgotten Pandemic (1976), could not be published under that title today, because we are more aware of it than we were 40 years ago. Even in 1976, the same people who excluded the Spanish flu from their list of the major disasters of the 20th century—and let’s face it, it was a particularly disaster-prone century—often had a family memory of the pandemic, and the same is true today. They can name a great-uncle who died of it, distant cousins who were orphaned, a branch of the family that was simply rubbed out in 1918. The Spanish flu is remembered, not as a historical disaster, but as millions of discrete, private tragedies. And for that reason it offers us a fascinating insight into the nature—and fallibility—of collective memory.