Damn, you beat me to it! “The theme is quest” is a catch-phrase in my household. (Even when I’m not under the influence of powerful hallucinogens.)
Fellow NYCer of similar age here. Astorian totally nailed this one.
I’m all grown up now, and I happen to be deeply entrenched in the history dodge here in NYC. I hear crap all the time from people approximately my age, most with a strong liberal bent, who claim that all they were taught in NYC schools when they grew up was DeadWhiteMan History. I roll my eyes at them.
What I want to tell them is this: “No, that’s what you think you were taught. You, like most of the kids I grew up with, thought history was too boring to pay attention in the first place. At the time they could have taught you that Columbus sailed to America in a space capsule and you would not have cared or known better. Now that you’re an adult and you’ve discovered that, say, there used to be Japanese-American internment camps, you’re all upset that ‘they didn’t teach that in school!’ Let me assure you, they did. You just weren’t paying attention.”
Here’s another voice (with a Bachelor’s in history, albeit only two months old) thirding what astorian said. I studied history intently all through out high school, it being my favorite subject, and there was a definite overall message of political correctness and “evil white men” from most textbooks. Thankfully I had two history teachers, both former cavalry captains in the Gulf War, who were intelligent enough to challenge our textbooks if there were blatant instances of historical revisionism. In middle school, my social studies teacher was a hippie and he had us read Howard Zinn. From 1998 to 2004 I was fed a pretty consistent diet of “the history of this country may be really great and everything BUT…BUT! BUT! BUT! There was SLAVERY! There was RACISM! They killed off all the INDIANS! We may have won World War II but we put the Japanese in CAMPS! etc etc.” There was always a BUT. Is that how it should be? Perhaps, but regardless, I certainly never experienced the “history they never taught you” phenomenon. On the contrary, I was always being bashed over the head by that history.
There must have been three months of my high school world-history class dedicated to various African countries, but I don’t think a single English or French king got more than a passing mention. Indeed, I frequently ask people just for the hell of it if they can name three English kings. They usually can’t.
The Pennsylvania State House bell was first cast by Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1751 or 1752.
It does not date from the 1600s.
I don’t. Lies My Teacher Told Me isn’t a very good book. It’s a polemic, which in itself is fine, of course, and it does point out problems with history textbooks. But he also gets a lot of his facts wrong, and his interpretations tend to be just as black-and-white, unnuanced, and biased as the type of history he’s criticizing. When I read it, I get the impression that he’s not so upset that the teaching of history in American schools indoctrinates students instead of teaching them critical thinking, but that it doesn’t indoctrinate students the way he wants them too.
Zinn’s book, for what it’s worth, is better. It’s Marxist revisionist trash and has all the failings of that (every conflict is class conflict, and everything is the fault of the elites who are routinely oppressing and marginalizing the underclass and minorities), but at least its honest about its biases and doesn’t try to be objective, and it does at least mention groups and events that don’t get much attention historically (like the Dorr rebellion, the Wobblies, Bacon’s Rebellion).
Not at all true. Panama had a history of separatism from Colombia that went back to 1821; Panama declared independence from Spain separately and voluntarily joined Colombia. Panama attempted to separate several times during the 19th Century. The Panamanian rebellion had its origins in the Colombian civil war known as the War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902). Disgruntled members of the defeated factions in Panama were intent on seceding from Colombia, and exploited US interest in a canal to get support for their actions. Of course Roosevelt and various other parties in turn exploited the rebels to get what they themselves wanted. But to portray the rebellion as something entirely manufactured by the US, or the Panamanian conspirators as mercenaries, is not correct.
Easy: Henry I, Henry II, and Henry III. 
That’s neither funny nor insightful.
I’m fine with the “Warts and all” approach to history. What I’m NOT fine with is
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The “nothing BUT warts” approach
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The Left’s insistence that the warts are being glossed over.
This is a big country, so obviously things vary. MAYBE there are school districts where history books take a “Rah rah America, we’re the greatest country ever” approach. But I haven’t seen them personally. In schools I’ve attended, the Howard Zinn model was the conventional wisdom.
Poor rich little white men, so oppressed and downtrodden. Your argument smacks of the odious “reverse racism” claims made by the suffering suburban masses. See, we don’t live in a cultural vacuum. Outside the classroom (and mostly inside it too), children are inundated with patriotic messages of rah-rah flag-waving arrogance and triumphalism. You probably don’t even see it any more for the same reason fish don’t pay attention to being wet.
And baby, if you think you’ve seen the warts, I promise you that all you’ve been shown is the wart on the very tip of the troll’s nose. There’s a whole ugly beast full of them that 99.9% of the population of Amerika isn’t even vaguely aware of, from the United Fruit Company’s overthrow of democratic governments to the Operation Northwoods, from the dropping of bombs on striking workers at Blair Mountain to the assassination of the Black Panthers, from the burning of Wilhelm Reich’s books to the training, guns, money, and CIA assistance given to death squads in Guatemala which killed 200,000 people. There has rarely been a State whose hands were so unrelentingly drenched in the blood of innocents.
My experience in Florida high schools (took American History in 1998) is that the textbooks glossed over stuff and the teacher didn’t.
The textbook presented Andrew Jackson’s invasion of Florida as a wholly defensive affair, for example.
and 80% were black.
No, 80% wore black.
Yeah…thats what I meant.
The OP reminds me of a Co-worker that was bragging about a paper she wrote for a college class about why there are no black serial killers.
I asked her * “What about Thierry Paulin and Wayne Williams?”
She was 
“uh…they didnt really do it.”
*Yes I am aware of Paulins mixed race and the “Williams is innocent” supporters.
Am I being whooshed? If you’re serious, there is no talking to you.
I figured that out his first post.
“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” – George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945
I believe their point is that the United States, for all its imperfections, is far from the most bloody-handed of nations.
So you are a nationalist for every State that is not the US? (Rome, for example, claimed only 3 years without warfare in around 1000 years of history, which sadly enough, probably does not set the record for “unrelentingly” drenching “hands in the blood of innocents”.)
Please stop doing this.
No, he should keep doing it. It’s a convenient marker to notify the reader of his biases.