I mean to be honest: history and historiography are both genuinely emerging disciplines and the perception of the point of history has changed wildly even over the last hundred years.
And we work off things from the time. So if the survivors aren't writing about it, there's relatively little for us to work with. Written and dissected history comes out of the examination of stuff from the time and from the period just after the time - that's . . . what we have to work with.
Moreover there . . . were honestly historians doing the dry-as-dust work about this shit: that's why now that there is interest that there's stuff to read. But "historians" don't set your highschool curriculae: those are set by teachers at best and politicians at worst. So, uh. How were they supposed to be getting that study to you?
This also has to be then put in the context where up until more or less the 20th century, epidemics and their consequences were such a common part of life that they were unremarkable - and all of them had the same factors as the Great Influenza: for the most part there was no one (that they knew of) to really blame, the epidemic was an act of god, while they had consequences the consequences were generally much less obvious than the consequences of, say, a war, and there was no real agency involved.
So epidemics are much more like natural forces, "acts of god", and are only of interest to historians prior to the shift in what history is ABOUT that happened in the early and mid C-20 (and is still going on, and is unfinished) if they are an obvious direct contributing factor to a big event that they recognized as significant.
(The Black Death is, in fact, so atypical because it was much more known as A Great Dying That Really Mattered.)
I mean: every single war you've ever heard of came with co-occurring significant epidemics. The end of just about every war came with bringing at least one of those epidemics back to the civilian population. It was taken for granted, and thus in many ways invisible, and reconstructing the layers of effect in retrospect is actually both quite difficult, and is often in the forefront of history and historiography - which takes about twenty to twenty-five years if not more to trickle down into stuff taught to non-history-majors.
tl;dr: It's, um. A bit funny to read "renew historians' interest in the topic" and "I fear most historians don't receive [the proper educational background]" when you're literally commenting on a post about a book on the topic written for the popular audience (which means that not only are there are a quite a lot of historians working on the topic but also that at least one of them is interested enough in teaching laypeople that they've made a publicly accessible text instead of publishing for the academic audience).
Here's the WorldCat results for a simple search of "1918 influenza".
I don't think the issue here is a lack of historians writing about it.
(If you'd like some recommendations for books out of the wide array of approachable-by-layperson histories on pandemics out there, I'd be happy to give some! Just let me know which diseases in particular you're interested in. Cholera is often particularly interesting, but typhus and typhoid also both shaped the world, and smallpox is of course a given.)
Re: long comment is long
I mean to be honest: history and historiography are both genuinely emerging disciplines and the perception of the point of history has changed wildly even over the last hundred years.
And we work off things from the time. So if the survivors aren't writing about it, there's relatively little for us to work with. Written and dissected history comes out of the examination of stuff from the time and from the period just after the time - that's . . . what we have to work with.
Moreover there . . . were honestly historians doing the dry-as-dust work about this shit: that's why now that there is interest that there's stuff to read. But "historians" don't set your highschool curriculae: those are set by teachers at best and politicians at worst. So, uh. How were they supposed to be getting that study to you?
This also has to be then put in the context where up until more or less the 20th century, epidemics and their consequences were such a common part of life that they were unremarkable - and all of them had the same factors as the Great Influenza: for the most part there was no one (that they knew of) to really blame, the epidemic was an act of god, while they had consequences the consequences were generally much less obvious than the consequences of, say, a war, and there was no real agency involved.
So epidemics are much more like natural forces, "acts of god", and are only of interest to historians prior to the shift in what history is ABOUT that happened in the early and mid C-20 (and is still going on, and is unfinished) if they are an obvious direct contributing factor to a big event that they recognized as significant.
(The Black Death is, in fact, so atypical because it was much more known as A Great Dying That Really Mattered.)
I mean: every single war you've ever heard of came with co-occurring significant epidemics. The end of just about every war came with bringing at least one of those epidemics back to the civilian population. It was taken for granted, and thus in many ways invisible, and reconstructing the layers of effect in retrospect is actually both quite difficult, and is often in the forefront of history and historiography - which takes about twenty to twenty-five years if not more to trickle down into stuff taught to non-history-majors.
tl;dr: It's, um. A bit funny to read "renew historians' interest in the topic" and "I fear most historians don't receive [the proper educational background]" when you're literally commenting on a post about a book on the topic written for the popular audience (which means that not only are there are a quite a lot of historians working on the topic but also that at least one of them is interested enough in teaching laypeople that they've made a publicly accessible text instead of publishing for the academic audience).
I mean.
https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=1918+influenza&qt=results_page
Here's the WorldCat results for a simple search of "1918 influenza".
I don't think the issue here is a lack of historians writing about it.
(If you'd like some recommendations for books out of the wide array of approachable-by-layperson histories on pandemics out there, I'd be happy to give some! Just let me know which diseases in particular you're interested in. Cholera is often particularly interesting, but typhus and typhoid also both shaped the world, and smallpox is of course a given.)