I don’t know, it sounds like you had 2 or 3 classes - it doesn’t really matter what the class is named, as long you learn.
Yes, it is. But arrogance is equally irrelevant to all. You should learn about important things, regardless of all else. There seems to be some pettiness in the conversation, which is really too bad. These boards are usually better than that.
The bloodshed itself is largely unimportant from a historical perspective. More important was the nature of the revolution, which borrowed largely from French and English writers like Locke, Hume, Smith, Helvetius, Diderot, D’almbert and others. What matters from a modern point of view is how these thinkers, embraced by the Revolutionaries, have had their beliefs and writings impact the world through American action during the course of recent history.
As to whether it was interesting - I don’t know, that’s pretty subjective. Most high school students think just about all history is boring.
ETA: not American action alone, but in large part
The American Revolution has a greater impact on today’s world than King Tut’s reign - I feel pretty confident in that. If no non-American agrees with me, I would be surprised.
Beyond that - I really don’t care how arrogant other Americans are or are not. That should not be a factor in determining curicula.
ETA: I am arrogant in general. But not because I’m American. I feel lucky to be born here because I know that a lot of people got a tougher break of things than I did. But being American wasn’t some skill I developed, and no one should consider being of a certain nationality to be a point of pride since it wasn’t choice or an accomplishment of the individual (except immigrants - that can show a lot of determination). So, yes, I’m arrogant, and I recognize that America has an impact on the world - but these aren’t related.
I’m sure In Winnipeg will dismiss this as “not a hell of a lot”, but I will do my best to remember what we studied in 10th grade World History.
We started out with a unit on World Religions - we were separated into 5 groups, each of which had to do a big presentation on one of five religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam). I was in the Islam group, so I learned a particular amount on that.
We also had to memorize the entire fucking map of Europe, bodies of water and everything. This was in 1993 and actually finding accurate maps of Europe was ridiculously difficult. Everything we had in the school library had a bunch of countries that had only recently ceased to exist.
I don’t recall that we spent much time talking about ancient stuff. We spent a really massive amount of time learning about the two World Wars, though. I mean, months on each one. There was a lot of stuff about China and the Kuomintang and the rise of Communism. Oh yeah, speaking of Communism, we did also learn a lot about the end of the Russian monarchy and the rise of Communism there. That was interesting to me, as my own fairly recent ancestors were Russian Communists. I don’t think we we really got much past WWII.
In retrospect, the class was terribly Eurocentric, although that’s probably okay, purely from a cultural literacy standpoint. I feel comfortable in my knowledge and understanding of the World Wars which generally come up in daily life more often than, say, South American or African history. (I’m not saying that those topics are inherently less important, just that there are many more references to the World Wars in media and daily interaction, so it serves me well that my teacher used our class time to teach me about them, instead of, say, the South American independence struggles.)
ETA: This was in a public high school in California. We also had World History in 7th grade, but I really can’t recall what we studied. Ancient Egypt and Greece for sure. I vaguely remember something about the Peloponnesian Wars.
Let’s see, my history curriculum was mostly relevant to Northern Ireland and went something like this:
Primary school
The Celts (the Giant’s Causeway field trip there)
The Egyptians (field trip to see the mummy at the museum)
The Greeks (excuses to dress in togas)
The Normans (trip to a Norman ruin)
The Victorians (trip to a Victorian school and some sort of work-house)
WW1 (trip to the Somme centre)
The building and sinking of the Titanic (we watched A Night to Remember)
Secondary school:
The Norman Conquest of Ireland (visit to a different castle)
The Tudors
The Plantation of Ireland
The English Civil War
Ireland 1798-1945
Northern Ireland 1945-present day
There was modern history too (seemingly mainly dictated by what movies our teacher wanted to watch):
WW1 (Gallipoli)
Germany 1918-1945 (Schindler’s List)
The Great Depression
The Korean War (MAS*H)
The Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis (an excuse to watch JFK)
The Vietnam war (Born on the 4th of July, Full Metal Jacket and Platoon)
We did a whole module on the French Revolution for A-level (2 years in depth study) which was very enjoyable. It was taught in the context of the world at the time, and we watched The Madness of King George among other things. The ARW was mentioned in passing and when talking about Lafayette and why the rest of Europe (and Britain in Particular) felt so threatened by the French decision to get rid of the monarchy.
In Northern Ireland we have enough relevant local history that still affects our daily lives to worry much about the ins and outs of the ARW.
I went to school in Ireland, which of course is not Britain. The American Revolution was the first chapter in our middle-school textbook on Modern European History (yes, Modern European History). It was treated as a sort of precursor to the French Revolution, which of course was the real deal.
The US didn’t turn up in the syllabus again until the Great War, where it got a nod for its participation from 1917 onwards, and then got more attention for its involvement in the post-war settlement.
My point was that I learned virtually nothing about the Soviet Union from school, especially its history. I suspect that my experience is not unusual, so it shouldn’t be a surprise if non-American students don’t learn much about US history from school.
Dammit- I forgot we studied Russia 1910-1953 (it was sort of woven between WW1, WW2, the rise of Mao in China and the Korean war).
I do remember my history teacher’s memorable words on the Yalta Conference- “the fate of the world rested on the shoulders of a depressed alcoholic, a paranoid ideologue and a dying polio victim using large quantities of opiates…any wonder they screwed it up”.
Hume and Smith weren’t English.
I’ve heard British historians refer to the American Revolution as the last stage of the English Civil War, and the apotheosis of the development of English civil society in the 17th and 18th Centuries. In other words, they think that the American Revolution was important because it was in effect a war between Englishmen and between English political philosophies.
But that’s neither here nor there, and it certainly isn’t high school-level history.
I remember covering the American Revolution in primary school (grade school to you Yanks). IIRC we zipped through it in 2 lessons and the emphasis was on the British government side - the political blundering and infighting that caused the Revolution to start and the strategic blundering and divisions that let it succeed. (This might have had something to do with our history teacher being a descendant of one of the blundering politicians, who liked to say that it was his family who lost the American Colonies). The only battles mentioned were Bunker Hill, Saratoga and Yorktown, and the only actual American figure given more than a passing mention was Washington. Thereafter the US dropped out of the story (no Louisiana Purchase, no War of 1812, no Civil War, no Wild West) until the late 19th century, when it reappeared as a threat to Britain’s industrial supremacy.
For O-level we did Tudors & Stuarts and never came close to the 18th century. These days, all GCSE & A-level history is done in “modules”, studying a few topics or periods in depth, rather than trying to fit 2000 years of history into a 2 or 3-year course. By far the most popular module is Nazi Germany; a quick Googling didn’t find any that covered the American Revolution.
And his descendents were cursed with teaching primary school, yea, for all eternity…
I remember at ‘little school’ going to places like unearthed Roman villas to see the mosaics and reconstituted pre-historic settlements. It’s not even as if it was a relatively peaceful 2,000 years in between; quite a lot of shit happened compared with most countries.
Scottish, sorry.
And if they were considering the acreage:
“The total area today of the states that comprised the 13 original colonies is just over 360,000 square miles, far less than half of the approximately 830,000 square miles of land ceded to the young country by Britain at the end of the Revolutionary War.”
However, note that most of those 830,000 sq. mi were unexplored and unnamed (by Europeans) at the time, and very sparsely inhabited. Prior to 1776 they were British territory as far as lines on maps go, but not in terms of settlements or productive land.
If one takes British India to cover the current nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, that comes to an area of over 1.6 million sq. mi.
I hope that isn’t a slight in my direction. I’m just giving my honest opinion and I feel no pettiness towards anyone else.
I would agree with you on the learning of important things. I think the reason it isn’t taught is because, to us, it may be of importance, but it isn’t one of the most important topics to cover, rightly or wrongly.
No - it was not directed at you. Sorry if you may have read it that way.
How cool is that - we’d do the same thing when I was a kid. If you think about where you grew up, and where I grew up, you start to realize how big the Roman Empire really was.
We did that too!
Wait, no we didn’t. Never mind.
(There is apparently an unexcavated Roman bath in the park of my village in Bulgaria. When I heard about it, I wanted to go dig it up, but no one took me seriously.)
I suppose another thing thing is you can’t keep doing other nations revolutions. The most important one is generally the one in your own country, followed by the French Revolution and, if you want to include it, the (first) Industrial Revolution. After that you need to start justifying inclusion at the cost of something else.
At least that’s how it was taught here . . . .