Spain gets the blame
1918 · Event
Neutral Spain's uncensored newspapers report the epidemic freely — especially when King Alfonso XIII falls ill — while the belligerents' wartime censors suppress theirs. The world concludes the disease is Spanish; Spain calls it the French flu. The name is the pandemic's first lesson in how information control shapes history.
On these timelines: The Spanish Flu, Pandemics & Plagues, Medicine through Time, Spain, Master
More from The Spanish Flu
- Spanish flu pandemic (1918)
- Spanish flu peaks in second wave (1918)
- The flu devastates India (1918)
- The Philadelphia parade (1918)
- Spanish flu pandemic begins (1918)
- The flu strikes the peace conference (1919)
- The Talune brings death to Samoa (1918)
- San Francisco masks up (1918)
Around 1918
- Mexican Revolution (1910)
- Presidency of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1923)
- Irish revolutionary period (1912)
- Russian Revolution (1917)
- Scott's Terra Nova expedition (1910)
- World War I (1914)
- Founding of the Soviet Union (1922)
- Pop music: the 1920s (1920)
- Pop music: the 1910s (1910)
- Stalin's rule of the Soviet Union (1924)