See, I couldn't understand how I had never heard of it, either, because I was a history nerd in school and remembered everything I was taught and I certainly would have remembered that. I also watched everything on the History Channel and owned half the VHS tapes (yes, I'm dating myself!) but at that time the network was very heavy on WWII and not much about the WWI era.
When I saw the Flu documentary, I asked my grandmother (who was born in April of '18) if her mother had ever talked about the Flu. She said that she had mentioned it a few times and how horrible it was, but never went into it. I imagine that since she was in the US for only a few years, spoke almost no English and had a newborn on top of two toddlers, the Flu must have been a total nightmare.
When I started researching and I found out that in the Twenties, the flu was rarely talked about and wasn't widely written about, almost as if it had faded from memory. The thought was because it had been so unbelievably horrible that people just wanted to forget. Especially in Europe because they were already dealing with the massive death toll from the war, and then the Flu on top of that.
See, I couldn't understand how I had never heard of it, either, because I was a history nerd in school and remembered everything I was taught and I certainly would have remembered that. I also watched everything on the History Channel and owned half the VHS tapes (yes, I'm dating myself!) but at that time the network was very heavy on WWII and not much about the WWI era.
When I saw the Flu documentary, I asked my grandmother (who was born in April of '18) if her mother had ever talked about the Flu. She said that she had mentioned it a few times and how horrible it was, but never went into it. I imagine that since she was in the US for only a few years, spoke almost no English and had a newborn on top of two toddlers, the Flu must have been a total nightmare.
When I started researching and I found out that in the Twenties, the flu was rarely talked about and wasn't widely written about, almost as if it had faded from memory. The thought was because it had been so unbelievably horrible that people just wanted to forget. Especially in Europe because they were already dealing with the massive death toll from the war, and then the Flu on top of that.
That's interesting about the Lusitania!