Found out most history textbooks still downplay the 1918 flu pandemic by a huge margin

I was looking at a 2021 textbook from Pearson and it only gave the Spanish Flu two paragraphs, even though it killed more people than both world wars combined - has anyone else noticed how little space major pandemics get in school books?

2 comments

2 Comments

stella_roberts25d ago

My buddy Dave found the same thing in his son's textbook @andrew_nguyen64 and just laughed.

andrew_nguyen6425d ago

Two paragraphs for something that killed 50 million people... sounds about right for a textbook that probably gives ten pages to the War of 1812. I flipped through my kid's high school history book last year and the whole section on the 1918 flu was basically "a bad sickness happened, then it stopped." Meanwhile they had a whole chapter on the invention of the cotton gin. Guess which one actually killed more people than a hundred wars combined. It's like they think diseases are boring or something, or maybe they just don't want to admit how fragile all our systems really are. Honestly makes me wonder what else they're glossing over...