This school sounds amazing.
Funnily enough, I don’t remember learning about any 20th century stuff in history at school, including the wars. Maybe it was too recent to count as history in my stuffy old girl’s school - they probably hadn’t got round to changing the curriculum (hopefully that’s a joke, but I’m not 100%).
Like everyone else, I can’t remember the first time I learned about the Revolution. It wasn’t taught as a history ‘topic’ at any point, which makes it distinct from: Ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece; Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions; French Revolution; Formation of the UK (1603-1745); World Wars I & II and their causes; The Stewart Monarchy; Medieval Papacy; the Crusades. And that list covers from ages c.9 to 17.
I do remember it coming up outside of school: references in tv and film; a couple of joke history books (1066 and All That, e.g.); Sharpe novels. It also came up outside of history classroom - e.g. as a Scottish youth you will spend a lot of time studying the works of Burns, and he was directly inspired by the American Revolution.
But at no point do I recall being offered the chance to learn the actual history of the Revolution, be that in terms of Kings and Dates and Battles, or the evolution of political ideas, or the impact on British politics. And I think this reflects a general point which is echoed by everyone else’s recall fo their schooling: the teaching of history in Britain is very much focused on the events that occurred on what is now British soil, plus some battles that for everyone’s convenience we held on the mainland of Europe.
That a significant amount of British history took place overseas and that these “foreign” events cannot easily be separated from “domestic” history is not something that is given any emphasis. Even the history of Britain’s involvement with Ireland, our nearest neighbour, is pretty much glossed over; meanwhile, we’re taught that there was an Empire but very little about what the getting and running of it actually involved including some fairly obvious things about e.g. where the Industrial Revolution got its raw materials from and who its finished products were sold to. From at least the 17th Century onwards it’s quite difficult to understand British history - be that military, political, social or economic - without understanding what Britain was and wasn’t doing in India, America, the West Indies, Australia, the Middle East, East Africa, South Africa, etc. but this context is very rarely given.
(In my experience, others’ may vary, caveat emptor)
In America in the 80s our curriculum would proceed at a normal pace until sometime during or after WW1, at which point the school year was drawing to a close and so we skipped to WW2 and everything about it other than the Holocaust was given short shrift and we never proceeded past WW2, even though everything up to and including Vietnam was in our books. I guess the teachers also thought that the events were too recent to need teaching relative to the previous stuff.
I wonder what percentage of Americans know that the Philippines used to be an American colony? (And that the United States fought a pretty nasty colonialist war there?)
Obviously that percentage isn’t zero (for one thing, America’s Endless 21st Century Land Wars in Asia have in fact caused the topic of the Philippine Insurrection/ Philippine–American War to be mentioned in various contexts in the American news media; plus U.S.-Filipino relations wound up playing an important role in World War II, and Americans do tend to learn about Word War II in school/watch World War II on the History Channel/buy Time-Life books about World War II/etc.; plus some people are just educated, of course). But I bet it’s way more likely that the average Filipino “man on the street” knows about that aspect of the history of the U.S. and of the Philippines than that the average American “man on the street” does.
I don’t remember learning about it in school. I vaguely recall hearing about taking it over from the Spanish, but after that, nothing: I don’t even remember being taught that American forces got attacked there in WW2, much less the colonial war that was fought in between the two events.
I learnt it in school in history lessons around 1970.
In my schooling (early/mid 60s - Montreal, Canada). we learned the bare bones of US history - the Revolution, War of 1812, Civil War, the Depression, WW1 and 2 - concentrating on the causes of each event. Not a word about the Alamo, or the Spanish-American War, and little about the Korean War. It was many years later before I discovered that Montgomery had captured and occupied Montreal during the winter of 1775-76.
British history was fairly well covered - but mostly in the England-Scotland environment - little about Ireland.
Of course - Canadian history was very well covered - the Indians were always the bad guys.
European history concentrated on Germany and France, and their various internal and external disputes. Little about Italy, Spain, and Russia.
Just like everyone else - no memory of being taught it. Though all the school history I can remember is crop rotation, millstones and wind/water power, and bloody kings and queens and their dates. (That’s “remember” in the sense that it was subject matter - I still have absolutely no grasp of the history of the monarchy). Nothing was non-British. And I should add that I dropped history as a subject at the earliest opportunity.
Like others, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know that the US had once been a British colony.
j
Ditto on having no recollection of learning it at school. I think you pick up the idea that the US was formerly British as an explanation for this honking great foreign country speaking English (or at least, having a jolly good attempt at it!).
I wonder, if you looked also at, say, French, Portuguese and Belgian history teaching whether you’d find the same sort of blind spots re. colonial history. One interesting difference with the US is that while other ex-colonial powers will acknowledge that they did indeed have an Empire, (“everyone loved being ruled by us, and then we graciously agreed to stop when they asked nicely”) I don’t know if the US would ever describe itself as a one time runner of colonies.
My history education was pretty hopeless. I recall a little of 1066, a smattering of “The Tudors” and that’s about it. However I do remember being aware of US civil/Independence/Tea/LittleBigHorn/Korea/Vietnam War. They are all the same thing aren’t they?
The thing about that is, the phrase “American Empire” is most often used to describe postwar-all-the-way-to-current “control” that the speaker thinks America has at levels below colonization, the level of control required varying by the user ranging from semi-consensual occupation like Vietnam to consensual military alliances such as Europe to diplomatic and/or covert methods like Latin America all the way to “Cultural Imperialism”.
So it’s difficult to speak about the “American Empire” full-stop with regards to their former and/or current colonies without giving the users of the other definition fuel to claim victory.
Same here.
This reminds me of a childhood memory of history. I grew up northern New England, near Quebec, and as a child I thought French was the language of Canada. So I remember figuring out a simple version of history when I was young; America had been the British colony, Canada had been the French colony, and Mexico had been the Spanish colony. And all three had revolutions and became independent countries.
Our colonalist past is pretty well ignored in favor of “rah, rah U.S.A!!!” in high school. Which I think is one of the reasons that the progressive left feels betrayed when they learn our history. If we taught from the beginning that we weren’t always the good guys, our Founding Fathers were flawed human beings (who did something pretty incredible, but were human), and that the struggle to achieve the ideals we were founded on is ongoing - but we HAVE made progress and will likely continue to - we’d probably be in better shape as a country.
As to Britain and the U.S. as a colony…its a flash in the pan event in the scope of British History - and its a complicated one because it wasn’t one colony, but thirteen, each with its own charter - it really doesn’t add anything to a British kid’s education to understand it, and as a tidbit of knowledge…there is lots of trivia out there to know - History without understanding is teaching trivia. Its far more important for British kids to learn their own democratic history - and that is a long evolution starting with the Magna Carta and moving through the recent moves to reform the House of Lords and has far more to do with the French Revolution than the American one.
I think I can be fairly precise as to how I first heard about the American War of Independance, as I certainly remember reading the second volume of the Ladybird Book of Kings and Queens at a very young age.
This is true. The American Revolution was not really a major event in the narrative of British history. From a British perspective, it was just one event in the long struggle with France that ran from 1627 to 1815.
I once (I’m American) tried to explain that to a bunch of Americans…that this was a little side war that had more to do with France than with American colonists and that the British had bigger fish to fry regarding France. Lets say that American Exceptionalism got in the way from them buying into us being a parenthetical in the overall situation between England and France. (And that struggle started back with losing Aquitaine. The English and the French had it in for each other for CENTURIES with English Kings claiming France).
Yes, the humbling truth is that the American Revolution was mostly a war between Britain and France with America just being one theater in the war (and arguably not the most important one).
We like to tell ourselves that the Battle of Yorktown won the war. But that battle occurred in 1781. The war went on for another two years. France and Britain fought a substantial naval war that really didn’t involved America. It was as a result of this naval war that Britain agreed to negotiate a treaty with France in 1783, in which American independence was thrown in.
Why? I’m guessing the first or second world war? But even had you lost either, why would you be speaking German?? It doesn’t make sense if they are talking about the George I, as we didn’t have anything to do with that…though that’s as close to you lot having to speak German I’d say.