This article traces the ways in which the subject of the "Spanish" Influenza pandemic of 1918-19, the worst short-term pandemic of modern times, has been treated (or ignored) by historians over the last 86 years. In doing so , it identifies four distinct surges of interest in the topic, each producing a different conception of this pandemic as history: as epidemiology, as high drama, as social science and ecology, and as scientific saga. It seeks to explain these differing conceptions as part of a wider phenomenon, viz., how an event can be neglected, discovered, made, and re-made as history.