Interesting. In the US, in high school (ages 15 - 18), we get one year of “world history” and one year of “US History.” When I was in high school (in the early 60s), the “world history” was very Euro-centered, and certainly included a bit of English history (Magna Carta, Cromwell, Napoleonic Wars, Queen Victoria.) The US history course included some British history as lead-in (colonialization of the Americas) to the Revolution. (We learned “War of 1812” but never were told that it was an adjunct of the Napoleonic Wars.)
Emphasis added. So, you did study some US history. 
The tension between England and France is actually relevant to the cause of the Americans in colonial, revolutionary, and early post-colonial times. So I’m thinking, would at least that be mentioned in British history lessons? France was very supportive toward the fledgling United States in that era.
I wasn’t particularly aware of this until I took U. S. History at the college freshman level (in the United States, I should clarify). For the first time, I actually read the entire Declaration of Independence. It includes a very lengthy, very detailed indictment of accusations against the King, listing in detail all his “crimes” against the colonists.
It occurred to me as I read this: This list is tacitly addressed to the French audience, for the French to read, to build up a good body of anti-Brit, pro-Colonist Recreational Outrage among the French. To that extent, it’s probably something valuable for British people to learn about.
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This is more of a poll than a factual question.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
I did my schooling in the UK and Australia, and I don’t remember learning anything about any specific famous Americans. The US did come in during studies on WWII, and there was some general stuff about slavery at some point.
Just for comparison, here’s the current Australian National Curriculum. They’re not learning about any famous Americans either…
Not a jot that I can remember. We had some books of learning about the place at home that mentioned some aspects of American history - the Revolution and their involvement in the World Wars - and I stumbled across some history books in primary school that mentioned a bit of American history here and there, but as mentioned above, what with the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans, the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian era, there was hardly time to go into much detail about the history of some piece of real estate across the ocean. Admittedly it was once part of our Empire and isn’t any more, but dear boy! so was nearly half the world.
Edison? Light bulbs are all very well but people like Trevithick, Stevenson and Brunel had a lot more impact on our society. Marconi too, if it comes to that: Italian, but he did a lot of his work over here.
My schooling, in England, was from early 1950s to mid-1960s. I don’t recall being, in the course of that, taught anything whatsoever about US history. I dropped history as a subject at age 15, after the General Certificate of Education “O” Level exams. The “history” course for said exam, was about rote-remembering of material from seemingly randomly-selected short historical periods – seemingly not with any kind of view to fostering pupils’ understanding of the world in which they lived. For me and my classmates, the periods studied were pre-US independence.
To the best of my understanding – all that I know about US history, I have learnt informally in various ways: some of it, in childhood; including stuff heard from my parents, who were quite well-informed, and, mildly, fans of the USA.
Fair is fair. I never learned much about English history in US schools.
Since we’re in IMHO now, I can relate the history I recall from California schools in the late 1950’s and early 60’s. It was a three-year cycle: California History for a year, U.S. history for a year, World history for a year, then back to California history.
There’s plenty of interesting California history, but I just recall hearing about the 21 Spanish Missions over and over and over (with mistreatment of the natives never mentioned). The most interesting California history was when I read a German bio of John Sutter for German class.
I was one of those kids that read encyclopedias cover-to-cover, so it’s hard to recall what we were taught in school – it was mostly stuff I already knew. The only specific recollection about British history is that the year 1215 (“right after lunch”) was drilled into our heads as of extreme importance, even ahead of 1066 and right behind 1492 and 1776.
Much much later I learned that the balance of power between English royalty and English nobility went back and forth for centuries, and the Magna Charta was just one blip along the way.
Not quite, from what I’ve read in this thread I as an American know a good bit more about English/British history than the average person educated over there and if you go back more than 800 years or so you get only scraps. Back before the Norman Conquest you get less than scraps.
We know a lot of semi-legendary and mythical stuff that happened in the British Isles for the thousand years prior to the Norman Conquest but it’s hard to argue that is “actual history.” Most of those legends are almost certainly complete distortions of real history (ex. the Battle of Mt Badon we have no actual evidence it ever happened or where it happened, and that’s one of the more notable parts of “history” for the British Isles post-Roman era and pre-Norman Conquest.)
If you go back to the Romans, you do find some better history as the Romans kept records of some things, but Britannia was a backwater of the Empire and thus even there we have little real history. The whole story of Boudica we know about because of Tacitus, but even still many of the details are unclear with conflicting stories. There’s certainly no actual British history predating the Roman Era, and through the Roman era the history is scant, after it is virtually non-existent and even for the first 100-150 years of the Norman Era there’s much we don’t know in spite the beginnings of more documented history.
Looking at the class work of my daughters their history classes are a lot less Eurocentric now. Asian, African and Middle East history is taught in the middle schools.
This is just false. Yes there are some blank spots and myths, and some stuff we know more through archeology than written history, but there is also plenty of real written and verifiable history, and historical records, of England in the centuries between the withdrawal of the Romans and the Norman conquest. King Arthur may be a myth, but kings like Alfred and Edmund and Aethelstan and Canute and Ethelred (and their deeds) are not mythical. Nor are evangelists like Columba or Aidan or Augustine, or, indeed, historians like Bede. Alfred may not have burned cakes any more than Washington burned down a cherry tree, but the battles he won were just as real. Anyway, even if it were true (which it certainly isn’t) that British history only begins with the Norman conquest, that still gives us twice as much as America. North America has absolutely no history whatsoever (as opposed to archeology) before European colonists started to arrive in the 16th century.
Yes, British history (as opposed to what is known from archeology) is scant before the Roman era, which is why I said (being a bit conservative) that we have two millennia of it, and yes, as is true everywhere, records from more recent times are more complete than those from the more distant past. Otherwise, you are simply talking out of your ass and showing your ignorance of actual British history.
Um, no. What we have are fragments of information. You’re painting a picture that before the Norman era British history is “spotty” but more or less complete. The opposite is true. There are actually many myths and uncertainties about Canute, the fact that you would mention him as a good example of pre-Norman historical figures is troubling, he is shrouded heavily in myth and legend.
Bede’s Ecclesiastica is the best work of history in that we have complete copies of it, but its biases are well known and it was narrowly focused on Church affairs.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is more broad in scope but also much less reliable. We in fact do not know much specifies about “the battles won” by figures like Alfred.
Actually you seem to be the one who is showing your ignorance here. We have scant histories that have survived to the modern era, and most of them are full of inaccuracies, written down legends, and outright bias and lies, as is typical of historical documents from the past. You pain knowledge of pre-Norman England to be at a state far different than what is true. I also find it strange that you are using the term “we”, since you personally have about as much connection to the pre-Anglo-Saxon Britons as I do to the Aztecs and scantly more connection to the pre-Norman Anglo-Saxons. Living on the same land does not make you part of that same culture or people.
Most importantly what history we do have before the Norman Conquest is the history of things like the Kingdom of Wessex, or East Anglia, or further north in modern day Scotland the different Kingdoms present at that time. Associating them with yourself in the modern days and looking down your nose at American history for “only dating back” 300 years (it’s actually unambiguously 400 years) is strange. It’s no more logical to claim a relationship between the modern day country called the United Kingdom and those early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms than it would be for the Italians to say their country is a continuation of the Roman Empire. At most I would say you can go back to the unification of England in the 10th century as a starting off point where you can clearly associate the modern United Kingdom (in part) with that middle age Kingdom, but before that it isn’t your history anymore than the Turks can define the Byzantine Empire or the Persian Empire as part of “their” history.
There’s a statue of Lincoln in Parliment Square, standing up from his chair as if looking for a pencil that rolled away.
There’s a tablet to JFK at Runnymede, quoting the “bear any burden” line. When that burden was borne in Vietnam somebody bombed the memorial.
I discovered that when I took a vacation to the UK when I was living in Germany in the 80s. I just randomly came upon the Lincoln statue and sort of scratched my head, I never thought about it again until I believe someone on these forums posted a GQ thread asking why it was there.
I realise this isn’t the question asked, but it made me wonder about what high school taught me about the world. We had one unit on NZ civil wars (European vs. Maori) but other than that, focus was on the world wars (some WWI, mostly WWII), in which there was very little mention of the US. The UK was mentioned a lot, which I guess makes sense, as Kiwis tend to feel a lot closer to the UK than the US. Germany, of course, was mentioned a great deal. The US - not much, some notes on how they came in late, Pearl Harbour, but nothing extensive. And ANZAC (Oz and NZ Army Corps) participation, mostly focused around Greek islands.
What did focus on the US was a unit on Civil Rights. We learnt about Rosa Parks, MLK, Malcolm X. To be honest, I think the only US figures we learnt about in any detail were leaders of the Civil Rights movement.
I’m not sure of the reason for your question, but if it has the broader focus of “anglophone history re: the US”, I hope this gave some small help.
GCSE - the USA from the end of WWI to the end of WWII, with quite a lot of focus on the Depression. A level - the USA from the War of Independence to the Civil War. I chose those courses, though. Before that, everyone did bits and pieces like Washington, the Civil Rights movement (not in much detail), JFK (particularly the Cuban missile crisis), the Boston Tea Party… other things.
We also learned a lot, and I now teach a lot, in the course of English lessons, to help contextualise what we were/are reading. For instance, as far as I know my students don’t do much on the Depression now in history lessons, but they learn about it from me when I’m teaching Steinbeck.
We did a lot more European and British history, obviously.
None.
Nor did we learn about French — Louis XI to The Wars of Religion, German — The First Reich to Franz II, or Chinese — The Warring States to the Advent of the Manchu — history. Nor much about British history.
What we did learn was a lot of boring crap about the Spinning Jenny and Eli Whitney’s invention of the Cotton Gin.
So that’s one American for you. Tangentially.
Public and high school, Ontario, 1970 to 1981:
I don’t remember doing a lot of US history,with one major exception. In grade 10, Sept 1977 to June 1978, I had a choice between taking boring old Canadian history, and something called “History of Revolutions” with Mr. Esler.
I took History of Revolutions because it sounded cooler, and it turned out to be one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. We studied the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Revolution. We also looked at the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, and watched a movie about the October Crisis (I believe it was the NFB production, Action, by Robin Spry).
It was a fascinating course; we looked at what drives people to revolution, the classic signs that a revolution may be near, and compared the different revolutions. We were studying the Chinese Revolution (1911 - 1949) just after Mao Zedong had died and the Gang of Four was in the headlines. We studied the Russian Revolution around the time that Boney M.'s “Rah Rah Rasputin” was popular, so we actually learned who he really was. I don’t remember as much about the American and French revolutions, possibly because there weren’t as many headlines or popular songs about them…
It was one of the best courses of my entire high school career.