Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten 'Spanish' Flu of 1918-1919 ed. by Guy Beiner (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten 'Spanish' Flu of 1918-1919 ed. by Guy Beiner Andrew Kishuni Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten 'Spanish' Flu of 1918-1919. Edited by Guy Beiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Guy Beiner's edited volume Pandemic Re-Awakenings is a comprehensive treatment of the theme of "memory" in the history and historiography of the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic. Bringing together twenty-three authors researching various aspects of the flu, Beiner's volume examines processes of remembering, forgetting and rediscovering that have determined individual and collective memories of the flu, their absence, continuity and reemergence after the flu's centenary and COVID-19. The result is a thorough and nuanced collection of chapters that express the complexities of memory in different parts of the world and from different perspectives. Beiner's volume is not the first to discuss memory and the flu, nor is the topic new ground for Beiner and contributors like Howard Philips and David Killingray. Pandemic Re-Awakenings marks the first time these authors share a single volume and the second time since 2003 that Phillips and Killingray share the same volume with other specialists in the history of disease, such as Geoffrey Rice and Nancy Bristow. Beiner arranges a preface, introduction, nineteen essays, a conclusion and an afterword into four sections, probing different levels of memory. Jay Winter's preface places the flu in historical and contemporary perspective, while Beiner's introduction addresses the theme of memory and emphasizes historical amnesia in the flu's historiography. Familiar readers will appreciate Beiner's credits to Richard Collier and Alfred Crosby and their contributions to memory studies since the 1970s. In the book's first section on individual memory, Hannah Mawdsley discusses Collier and his legacy; Killingray examines mortality and memory in largely illiterate, non-industrial, non-Western communities; Philips explores the difference between "silence" and "forgetting, erasure or amnesia" (81) for survivors in South Africa; Claudio Bertolli Filho revisits his interview with an elderly flu survivor in Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Ida Milne elaborates on the complexities of oral histories of the flu and its relevance to COVID-19 in Ireland. In a second section on communal memory, Łukasz Mieszkowski evaluates the flu's imprint in cultural memory and social forgetting in Poland; Utz Thimm discusses memories of the flu in Belgium and the Netherlands between the two world wars and German occupation; Kandace Bogaert and Mark Osborne Humphries disentangle the relationship between World War I and the flu in Canadian memory; Geoffrey Rice differentiates between governmental and institutional memory and private familial memories in New Zealand; David Arnold examines memories of the flu between nationalism and British colonial rule in India; and Peter Hobbins looks at the dynamics of memory in Australia between digitization, local history, and community healthcare. In a third section entitled "Medical Histories," Mark Honigsbaum discusses the evolving relationship between flu history writing and advances in the life sciences after the mid-twentieth century; Jeffrey Reznick explores medical histories of the pandemic in the United States; E. Thomas Ewing asserts the flu's place in the Russian and global historical perspective; and Robert Peckham provides a fresh analysis of dueling historiographies of the flu in the US and China and the complex ways in which the flu is remembered in China. In a fourth and final section entitled "Cultural Histories," Samuel Kline Cohn, Jr, challenges the flu's "forgottenness" and contrasts it with cultural memories of the Black Death; Steffen Bruendel hunts for the flu in European modernist literary and artistic sources; Cynthia Gabbay demonstrates processes of cultural remembrance through various mediums in Ibero-American cultures in the century after 1918; and Nancy Bristow remarks on the flu's inconvenient narrative in US cultural memory, one in which the flu's carnage is at odds with American exceptionalism. This fourth section makes a strong contribution to the field and answers Phillips' scholarly invitation back in 2014 for deeper study of the flu's understudied cultural history. Beiner's conclusion brings readers up to the past two and a half decades of scholarship, between "pre-forgetting and post-forgetting" (346), as the global community...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".