Whilst conveniently ignoring that I am merely countering a claim that someone else made - that the Constitution created a stable Government and thus was the primary reason for the US’s success.
So yes, clearly I am trolling. :rolleyes:
Then we have fundamentally different views of what a stable government is. For me, half the government starting a war so they can go off and form their own country with their own government isn’t what I would call stable. Your argument is more like if a man stands on a boat in rough weather, trying desperately to stay upright, and manages to do so until the fine weather arrives then during that period the boat was stable because he didn’t fall over. That is incorrect. The boat was unstable, but due to combination of other things he managed not to fall over.
I think you’re seeing things too much through modern American eyes. At the time of US independence, the American Colonies were just an outpost of empire. We had a few of those. Whereas France was one of the most important world powers at the very heart of the main political theatre of the day - Europe. A revolution in France had major repercussions for it’s neighbours, allies and enemies. The US, not so.
What’s more, it caused huge panic amongst similar regimes (monarchies such as Britain) who feared a similar event could happen to them. It also paved the way for the rise of Napolean, with cataclysmic repercussions for Europe as a whole in the following decades.
Perhaps you can see why the French Revolution was so much more important as a world event at the time. There’s no conspiracy amongst British historians to downplay the American Revolution, it just wasn’t AS important as other things going on at the time, at least from a European perspective.
The Italian government doesn’t undergo structural change. It just undergoes regular personnel changes. The basic system of government remains the same no matter how often the party in power collapses.
I think you’re missing my point. The American Revolution led, rather directly, to the French Revolution. This happened in two ways: first, American political thought influenced the French. Benjamin Franklin, during his time there, was a rock star. And as I’ve already mentioned, American revolutionary documents, such as the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence influenced what the French did politically a decade later. Moreover, French spending in support of the American Revolution did much to bankrupt the French regime, which led (less directly) to the Revolution in France.
For the British to pretend that the American Revolution was inconsequential to European events is, well, wrong. If you don’t see that, well, maybe you’re looking at events too much through English eyes.
The French Revolution had many, many causes, and was not “led to” by the Americans doing anything. The revolutionaries (in France) may very well have taken heart, as well as political and philosophical ideas, from what your lot got up to, but it wasn’t as if the French were just sitting there happily under their monarch and then thought, “Hey, the Americans are doing it, and in a couple of hundred years they’ll be really big! Let’s do it too!” (If you feel like thinking about it, perhaps ponder why, when Ben Franklin got there, he was already so renowned. Would they have been watching that closely if they weren’t interested?)
Please be sensible. Of course the British were more concerned about something which was happening less than thirty miles away than they were about something happening across the Atlantic. We had a huge empire; it all went away, bit by bit - some with a bang, some with a whimper. In general our knowledge of what happened ( I mean what we’re taught about what happened, not what we choose to learn) is proportional to the actual impact it had on Britain to lose that colony, and what our relationship was like afterwards. However our historical links with France as well as its proximity made big events there hugely important, as well as influential in our own political history.
What part of my statement that I wasn’t accusing you of “trolling” did you fail to grasp? I am simply using an expanded version of the common statement, “that’s a red herring.” Get it? :dubious:
Ok, then either you must acknowledge that your own government has not been “stable” during the last century, since it had a successful revolt by a significant portion of it, or you must rethink your position on “stability.” And in the process, you might want to consider that half the federal government did NOT start a war. Instead, significantly fewer than half the political subdivisions of the country decided they were going to attempt to leave via a war. This is an important distinction. If the Republicans had declared war upon the Democrats (on the basis that they were supporting slavery), and attempted to take over the federal government, then that would be both a true Civil War and an unstable government. Instead, at the FEDERAL level, the whole thing was handled politically. Indeed, one can assert that it was the stability of the situation that forced the southern states to attempt to leave the compact, because they could no longer maintain their special right to own slaves through the mechanisms of the stable federal government.
Now, which is it? Were/are we stable? Or is Great Britain unstable?
Then your ignorance has already been corrected. I have not been ignorant of the subject for a decade and a half. Secondly, while the independance movement is legal, it’s break the law, apparently because of their own sour grapes.
And both revolutions were directly inspired by Tom Paine, who came from Thetford, England. In fact he came over to America specifically to start a revolution, succeeded, and then went to France to start one there, and succeeded again.
So we even started your own revolution against ourselves!
Teacake, I began by responding to Sri Theo, who had written this:
This statement makes no sense. How is the American Revolution an “adjunct” to the French Revolution, when the American Revolution came first by more than a decade, and when the French acknowledged that The Rights of Man took inspiration from the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence? How does that make the French Revolution more relevant to the development of human rights?
There seems to be a real determination on the part of some posters to belittle the role of the American colonies in the human rights revolution of the 18th century. Where does that come from?
I’ve seen more than one poster in this thread dismiss the American colonies as a mere “outpost”. Insignificant, really. (Harumph.)
This misunderstanding of the facts would be laughable if it weren’t being promoted here in such earnest.
The colonies had, by the time of the Revolution, been in business for over 150 years. They were a vital source of income for the Empire, and a large segment of its population. To give you some idea, the population of the US by the time of the first census in 1790 was nearly 4 million. The population of England and Wales in 1791 was 7.7 million. Hell of an “outpost.”
“I’m sure those grapes are sour anyway,” sniffed the Fox.
Oh, in my defence I didn’t mean that the American Revolution was a side issue to the French one, its more that we were studying the French revolution and in order to understand that we had to look in part at the previous American Revolution.
And we spent more time learning about Indian Independence/Partition then either of them
You do have to remember that most people here won’t be able to tell you anything about our own civil war so learning about other people’s wars isn’t very high on the list.
And thinking about I learnt most of what I know about American history in politics class.
Oh, absolutely. See, I am not trying to deny the Enlightenment figures of England their credit. Yet, there seems to be a reluctance to give the Americans their due.
Really? That’s pathetic. I guess British high schools have very limited history education. One of the world’s most important countries, right next door, a critical and ongoing player in British events, and there’s not even an offering of an optional course in their history?
Optional courses don’t really exist as such in British schools almost until the college level. You take the classes you’re sent to. At my last secondary school, for example, you only had a choice between languages (any two out of German, Latin and Spanish, plus French and English) and between I.T. and some other course that was kind of like shop class- you learned how to weld, operate a lathe, and stuff like that, but also CAD/CAM stuff.
Is this situation any different from how it is in US high schools? How many US schools offer a course in Latin American history? I’m sure we had no such option in my day. I recall only a limited number of “electives” we could sign on for, and they were mostly frivolous classes such as Typing (damned useful that turned out to be, though). Really, you were in a US high school more recently than me, what were your choices? I don’t disagree that the situation is pathetic, but I don’t see the UK as abnormal in this regard.
“American History” and “World History”, with Honors flavors of both. Neither touched on Latin America other than the Spanish-American War, the Mexican War, and the Roosevelt Doctrine.
That said, I don’t think njtt really understands that French history is British history, and that you can’t study one without the other.
Please stop with the sour grapes. The only person with their nose out of joint around here is you, because you think we’re not taking you seriously. I don’t think anyone’s trying to belittle the importance of anything. No-one is saying that the United States didn’t happen or that they aren’t important now. However, what we are trying to point out is that TO US you were, and I’m afraid it’s true, just another colony. We had lots of them. In terms of what was important to us at that time, France and its events just had more of an impact. Someone earlier on said something about the US being the most powerful nation in the world for the last sixty years. We were taken over by the French 943 years ago, and that’s just where most people’s education about us and the French starts. Then you’ve got the links between our people, our royalty, our language, our customs, and the fact that we fought them for most of a thousand years. We have a LOT of history with them.
A student I’d known since September dropped out of my class a couple of weeks ago. He left, I noticed, I’ll probably never see him again. Bye bye kid. If you need a reference or something, call me. Maybe in a few years when you’re rich and famous, I’ll call you. On the other hand, a student I taught for five or six years in the past, who also happens to be my cousin’s husband’s niece, is more important to me now and I’ve bothered to stay in touch, keep up with what she’s been doing and generally take an interest.
Understand that when we talk about ‘school’ we generally mean ‘up till the age of 16,’ especially in a discussion like this, because all courses are optional after the age of 16. The French revolution is, in fact, almost always studied at key stage 3 (age 11-14), because it’s part of the ks3 national curriculum for history.
It’s not covered at GCSE level (at the moment), but that hardly means that there’s a lack of history education at that age - there’s more than enough to get through!
It’s probably best not to judge British schools as ‘pathetic’ based on an assertion by a single poster.
Suppose the leading world power were some loathsome, amoral, fascist state. And they had enjoyed roughly US-type status for roughly the same amount of time (for all or most of our lifetimes) and had had the same government from the start. My stance would be the same: the origins of this state would be worth studying. Regardless of blood ties, shared history etc. If this state had some kind of foundational charter, that would be worth looking into as well. I realize the OP was playing off the angle of UK/US shared history, but this more universalist view is how I was seeing the question. It’s not about cheerleading for anyone.
