The Untold History of the United States of America

In My Humble Opinion
41

Don’t forget that we got into the war because Germany sank the Lusitania and killed a bunch of Americans. There might be a vague mention that Germany made announcements and put an ad in the New York Times warning Americans not to sail on the Lusitania because the Germans planned to sink it. There might also be a vague mention of the Zimmerman Note (Where the Germans tried to get the Mexicans to invade Texas and keep the US busy).

The only real mention of the Empire of Japan’s participation in WWI I got came from my Air Force JROTC class.

To be fair, Kennedy was assassinated before the Vietnam War took off. Most Post-Civil War history classes I’ve taken end around Vietnam, saying that history beyond that is still too fresh and unagreed-upon for discussion in that sort of class. I took a US History correspondance course in high school that ran all the way up to the Gulf War, but the chapters got mighty thin after Vietnam.

I’ve learned some fun stuff from history classes in college, which go more in-depth on things. I present to you Raguleader’s Not Quite Unbiased History of the United States Part I:

The English colonists WERE escaping religious persecution, in many cases, but in most cases the earliest ones were being paid handsomly to do so, with a very low mortality rate.

The Mexican American War started because the Mexican army attacked some US troops in US Territory in Texas… about 100 miles south of where US territory had previously been agreed to exist :wink:

During the American Revolution (American Rebellion, whatever you like to call it), England found itself fighting (or at least getting no help from) most of the other European powers, because they were annoyed with England for grabbing too much territory in the French and Indan War. We were supposed to keep fighting England even after they gave us our Independence, in order to keep the English from concentrating on their other foes, but since we didn’t like them funny-speaking Catholics anyway, we made peace with England and left the French and Spanish in the lurch.

Incidentally, Devil of a Whipping is an excellent book, probably the best book I ever had to read for a class.

Shortly after, France has a revolution, their new government says they will sieze any American ship carrying any English goods (supposedly up to and including a English handerchif in the Captain’s pocket), we un-officially team up with the Brits to fight the French

Shortly after is the Barbary War, our very own first war in the Middle East, fought because the Corsairs of Tripoli were siezing American shipping and holding the crews for ransom. Mishaps in this war included an American frigate, the USS Philidelphia, running aground and being captured by the Tripolitans, who moved it close to their fort to keep us from trying anything to get at it. Some Marines and sailors “borrow” a Corsair boat and use it to sail up to the Philidelphia, board it, and set fire to it, destroying the ship. Admiral Horatio Nelson later described this as one of the boldest raids of its time (and the Marines sing about it from time to time). The war is ended by besieging the city with a mercenary army marched from Egypt and bombing the city with Mortar Ships borrowed from the King of the Two Sicilies (all while the USS Constitution shelled the fort to keep it from shooting at the mortar ships). A few years later, we had to go back to deal with the same damn problem.

War of 1812: The Royal Navy is impressing American sailors (including three taken from an American warship at gunpoint), and we want to bring the shining light of Democracy to the Canadians, who are no doubt just itching to throw off their English overlords. We invade Canada, get sent packing, and shortly after the English burn the White House (but it’s OK, we build another one). The Royal Navy has a number of encounters with something they haven’t seen before: American ships that can defeat them in battle, including a new type of Heavy Frigate that is both faster than British frigates and considerably more heavily armed and protected. The British decide to take the city of New Orleans as a bargaining chip, and arrive with 10,000 soldiers, forgetting one minor detail: They need ladders to scale the levee walls which block their advance while the Americans (including a force of pirates) shoot at them (the Brits lose this battle).

Civil War happens due to all sorts of stuff, Slavery isn’t a really central issue until the Gettysburg Address (a number of Northern states had slavery before the Civil War, and continued to do so during the war). The Confederates, despite winning all sorts of early battles, are badly outnumbered, lack an effective Navy, and cooperate poorly on a strategic sense, and fail to get European support because they sold them too much cotton early on, leaving England and France with cotton surpluses until after the Civil War (thus depriving the Confederates of their best bargaining chip when they needed it most).

Reconstruction happens, it sucks for the South. Nothing apparantly happens until the 1890s, when there are some depressions, recessions, and finally a war with Spain, largely the result of a circulation war between competing groups of yellow journalists.

The Spanish navy is beaten to a pulp both times it is engaged by the American Navy. The Spanish commander in Manilla Bay moved his fleet out from the protection of shore artillery, fearing that poor American gunnery would accidentally result in the city being hit by stray shots (it turned out that the Americans did have remarkably poor gunnery in the ensuing fight). Spanish soldiers in Cuba are terrified by the “Smoked Yankees”, black soldiers brought in from the western frontier to fight the Spanish. The black soldiers make the most of it by using indian war cries while fighting the Spanish.

A bunch of American soldiers get sick due to spoiled meat being packed in their rations, leading to Teddy Roosevelt (a Cavalry commander in Cuba) having a serious bone to pick with the meat industry after he becomes President.

We nearly get into a war with Mexico twice, then sucessfully get into a war with Germany (kicking butt and taking names by not fighting any major battles until near the end of the war). The US Navy also has one of the best records for time patroling vs. time in port durign WWI (the Japanese Navy also does exceptionally well in this regard, while fighting U-Boats in the Mediterranean). Germany gets hosed by the Treaty of Versalles. The US Congress nobly doesn’t ratify the harsh treaty, though mostly because they didn’t want to join the League of Nations.

The 20’s rocked, the 30’s sucked, FDR got elected in 1940 by saying he would keep us out of WWII, then immediatly begins ramping up the military. Japanese attack us at Pearl Harbor, we declare war on them, Germany and Italy declares war on us, and it’s 6 months before we deign to show up in Europe. We spend 4 or 5 months getting kicked around by the Japanese Navy before fighting them to a draw at the Coral Sea, and later kicking them in the teeth at Midway. The next few years suck for pretty much everyone, and the Army Air Force takes more casualties than the US Marines due to the bombing campaign over Europe. The war is won due to American know-how, British stubbornness, French feistyness, and a remarkable ability on the part of the Russians to out-atrittion most of the German Army. We bomb everyone into the stone age, then pay large sums of money to fix them up.

Everybody goes home and buys jeeps, we go to war in Korea which pretty much sucks for 3 years, most of the 50’s and 60’s were apparantly not interesting, then we fight in Vietnam, which sucks for mostly everyone involved. Contrary to what some say, casualties are evenly represented between the Reserves and the Active Duty soldiers, disproportionaly more officers die than enlisted (especialy amongst the lower officer ranks, with Lieutenants often leading from the front and tending to draw fire in battle). The Tet Offensive is the largest defeat the Viet Cong suffer during the entire war, but after that it doesn’t matter because we decided we had had enough of the war and go home.

Disco seemed like a great idea at the time, but then it got old. The 80’s featured the truck-bomb in Beirut that killed 220 Marines, the US invasion of Grenada to get rid of the communists there, and the US invasion of Panama because Noriega was being a prick. There was also a really weird thing where we sold weapons to Israel so they could sell them to Iran so Iran would let go of some US hostages they took, so we could spend the money on counterrevolutionary fighters in Central America. I’m pretty sure we might have mixed it up with Iran and Libya to varying degrees in the 80’s too.

The 90’s had the Cold War end, some guy named Saddam invaded a country, so we went in to kick him out, teaching him that troops dug in on the beaches do little good when the other side attacks overland instead, and that tanks dug into big foxholes on the ground are easy pickings for laser bombs. Later on we went to Somalia because they were starving, some bad sorts mixed it up with us and shot down some helicoptors and killed some troops, and soon after we left. Later still we mix it up with some guys in Serbia because they were being jerks, do lots of peacekeeping all over the place, and spend way too much time worrying about an Arkansas lawyer fooling around with the office intern. This is pretty much as far as even the latest history classes I took went, and the last 2 or 3 decades go by in a week or so.

This concludes Raguleader’s Not Quite Unbiased History of the United States, Part 1.

Stay tuned for Raguleader’s Not Quite Unbiased History of the United States, Part 2, featuring Election 2000: The Musical, Firefly, and the final Harry Potter book: Harry Potter vs. the Space Nazis. :smiley:

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Raguleader(and others), this is not Great Debates-if you wish to debate this, take it to the proper forum.
Thank you.

43

I cannot provide a cite but I recall from some reading that Britain was forced to decide whether to keep fighting the American colonies or put the kibosh on a growing rebellion in India. India being much more lucrative a property than the future united states (and probably seeing America as being much more likely to cozy up in terms of trade of goods with their former bosses once bloodshed ended) they decided to divert troops and resources to India.

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Agnostic, you might want to check out Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Leowen – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684818868/qid=1136335905/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-1308596-4843136?n=507846&s=books&v=glance.

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The main flaw with American history is that it is still taught from the point of view of the New Englanders, excluding the French and Indians and Dutch and everyone else.
The first American colonists were not in Plymouth. The oldest American cities are in Florida and New Mexico.
The Canadian experience is part of the story, and before the revolution those colonies were not considered especiall distinct- each colony was an island unto itself.

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Growing up in the south mostly attending all-white private schools with white conservative teachers, I probably don’t have to mention how fair and accurate the teaching of both the Civil War and Civil Rights were. I was shocked to learn about Andersonville when I was in high school (I learned about it from PBS, not from school) because (like Frank McCourt recounts of schooling in Ireland, where the English were the bringers of all evil) I was always taught that the Yankees were barbarians while the Southerners fought the war like gentlemen. Also, it was mentioned at some point (this was long before the movie Glory) that a few blacks fought in the war, but few was defined as almost 200,000 (i.e. there were more blacks fighting for the Union than there were white Alabamians fighting for the Confederacy).

Old classics that I particularly enjoyed were various of Bruce Catton’s works, and of course now the Ken Burns documentary is an absolute must. (It will seem cliched to you if you’re under 30, but that’s because it’s been copied so much.) There are many documentaries available on The Revolution but I’ve yet to find one that’s anywhere near Burns’s Civil War in quality, though McCullough’s biography of Adams, Isaacs’ biography of B. Franklin and for a brief overview of American wars with lots of mini-biographies within Robert Leckie’s books are good.

B.I.O.N., I recently watched the PBS Broadway miniseries and it is great… as social history! It’s a lot more far reaching than it sounds. Also don’t underestimate how much you can learn from really good historical fiction (I’m not talking about bodice-rippers, but Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man books, anything by Michener and Herman Wouk’s Winds of War.

Things I didn’t learn in school that I wished I had, some of it more and some of it less politically correct than what’s taught today:

-As mentioned already, Independence from England was not a universally passionate cause (and I learned that from the musical 1776 of all places!)

-ALL states practiced slavery prior to the 19th century, and there were bloody slave uprisings in Massachusetts and New York City

-Tituba, the slave involved in the Salem witch trials, was not black

-The Puritans and Pilgrims were 1) two very different types of Calvinists 2) not at all the joyless black clad sex hating lot they’re pictured as 3) not always the villain or the agressor in their fights with Indians 4) had every right to be judgmental and intolerant of who settled the land they struggled and died to settle (up to a point)

-The English bungled their farming and other enterprises in Jamestown not because they were incompetent as farmers (which was taught even in college) but because they happened to land during the worst drought in centuries and centuries. The Indians were starving too, which is what caused much of their mutual hatred (English raids on Indian stores out of desperation, Indians understandable bloody retaliation, etc.- the relations one to the other were damned from the get-go).

-While the Spanish conquistadores were at least as bastardly lot as portrayed, much of their success was not due to firearms or Indian superstitions but bloody Indian civil wars (especially among the Incans). While de Soto is recorded in history as a total genocidal nightmare, he was in reality a very complex man who actually risked his life to see the Incans treated more humanely and who had half-Indian children and a half-Indian wife (in addition to his Spanish wife) he loved very much. Much of the barbarity of his expedition was born of sheer unadulterated terror on the part of his men, who were hopelessly lost and more hopelessly outnumbered and were deliberately trying to scare hell out of the Indians so they could survive. (This doesn’t make the actions any less despicable, but it does make them a bit more explicable.)

-While Santa Anna was a ruthless dictator and nutcase, the men at the Alamo, while valiant, weren’t that much to be pitied. They violated their treaties in a foreign land, refused to honor the Spanish prohibition on slavery, refused to convert to Catholicism (forget religious liberty- this was not America they were in and they had agreed to play by Mexican rules) and also never expected to fight to the death (they were expecting reinforcements)

-In addition to the black units in the Civil War, many blacks fought for and or served the British in the Revolution. There are pitiful accounts of the British withdrawals from Savannah, Charleston and other southern seaports that rival the pathos of the Fall of Saigon, with slaves promised their freedom by the British choosing death by drowning rather than life onland as they tried to swim to the overcrowded British ships. (The British actually kept their promise to thousands of slaves to liberate them if they defected, but they hadn’t the manpower or the ships to transport them all, plus of course they lost.)

-The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were much more like bloodbaths than virgin births.

Oh well, this is already too long, but… well, there is no but. Sorry.

47

I learned about this from… Liberty Kids on PBS. A cartoon series about a group of kids who act as reporters for Ben Franklin during the Revolutionary War.
One of the supporting characters is a former slave whose brother ends up joining the British. If memory serves he ends up a POW after a battle.
It’s a surprisngly good educational cartoon that features episodes long story arcs covering the history. Some interesting celebrity guests do voices… weirdest is Ben Stiller as… Thomas Jefferson.

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Don’t forget the fact that they inadvertently transmitted Old World diseases to the Indians, and a huge percentage of Indians died and Indian societies were disrupted as a result. I don’t blame the Spanish conquistadors for that- there’s no way they could have prevented it even if they wanted to.

In fact, Guns, Germs, and Steel says that the Inca civil war you mention was precipitated by the previous monarch’s death from smallpox.

(Yes, I know that there were later attempts to deliberately infect Indians with European diseases. I haven’t seen anything saying the early Spanish conquistadors did that, though)

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My Amazon wishlist is growing by leaps and bounds. Thanks again to everyone for their suggestions. I am glad to hear that others have bookmarked this thread as well.

I came in to recommend another book also, that Guns, Germs and Steel reminded my of. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes. This was one of my texts for an international studies course. He goes beyond history into economic and sociocultural analysis, and I did not agree with all of his conclusions, but his historical chapters were well written. He made an excellent arguement for the differences in outcome between North America and the rest of the New World. The genocide of the native populations were a major factor, as well as their impetus behind the slave trade, which he covers well also.

50

Eep, sorry. The OP asked how US history was taught to us in high school and college, and in hindsight I probably went overboard (as I tend to do).

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Actually, it was about slavery. Four slave states (not “Northern,” really) did not secede. Two decided not to because of very real threats made by the federal government (Maryland and Delaware), one narrowly avoided secession (Missouri), and one remained neutral until it was invaded by the Confederacy (Kentucky).

South Carolina’s Articles of Secession make specific mention of slavery, and laws passed in other states, like New York and Pennsylvania. The precipitate cause of Secession was Lincoln’s Inauguration. Lincoln said would have allowed the South to keep their slaves if it could have preserved the Union. He never said he would have allowed it to spread west, and he wouldn’t have. The southerners realized that if slavery were confined to the southeastern corner of the country, it was only a matter of time before it was abolished. Chattel slavery was already on its way to obsolescence by 1860, but slaves were still a status symbol, and the institution of slavery guaranteed white supremacy.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves. It only applied to the states in rebellion. The military governments freed the southern slaves. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments freed the rest.

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I always found the Emancipation Proclamation rather ironic - “all slaves are now free in all areas we do not have jurisdiction over.” Or rather, there was a slight dispute going on over jurisdiction. What little Civil War history I learned back then seemed more concerned with the military aspect - who were the generals, what were the important battles - ignoring the social and political aspects. Not only the textbooks, but encyclopedia articles as well which I read alot of for reference (and just to kill time, but that’s for another day.)

But, not to start a debate, I realized my main problem with Black History Month and the like is that is has become more ‘lets celebrate the achievements of blacks who were neglected’, cue profile on George Washington Carver. Or they will highlight the struggles during the Civil Rights movement, ignoring the systemic racism that precipitated the movement. I did not learn until after high school (or maybe reading Zinn) that the KKK had only recently become a fringe group. And that Catholics suffered as well as minorities.

I see the same trend in other histories like the Labor, and Women’s Rights movements. Celebrating individual achievements while ignoring the larger social/historical picture.

Have others noticed this?

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One of the states that did seceed, Tenessee, apparantly ended up having it’s own miniature civil war between the plantation owners and the poorer white folks who lived up in the mountains. From what I recall of my history classes, this was basically a guerilla war. I also seem to recall something about Kansas having a smaller civil war of it’s own, but I don’t remember if that was before or during the American Civil War.

I’ve heard that there were a fair number of Union fighting units that came from Texas (where some public figures, such as former Texan President/Governor Sam Houston were Pro-Union), but at the moment I haven’t been able to find any cites for this.

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Before.
Google “Bloody Kansas”

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And don’t forget the “see how you like it” birth of West Virginia. There were also guerilla-type actions in Eastern North Carolina and parts of Arkansas.

56

That’s not entirely accurate, with regards to Kentucky. While there was an official declaration of neutrality by the Kentucky General Assembly, the Jackson Purchase was a hotbed of Confederate sympathizing to the point that local officials confiscated state property for Confederate use and a convention was held to discuss seceding not only from the Union but from Kentucky to join the state of Tennessee.

True, it wasn’t until the Confederate army seized Columbus and attempted to blockade the Mississippi that the Union came in and took control (under Gen. Grant, no less) but Kentucky was less than neutral during the early stages of the war.

57

As we discussed above, there were mini civil wars in a lot of states. It’s kind of interesting to think about how things would have fallen out if each county could have gone whichever way it wanted.

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Carver reminds me of something that’s sorely missing from most history classes, which is the WHY? aspect.

First, a side anecdote: My high school math teacher, the same one who gave bonus points if we signed petitions to keep Ozzie Osbourne from performing concerts in Alabama and who asked us to boycott McDonald’s because Ray Kroc had given millions to the Church of Satan (which is, of course, a kroc of shit), refused to eat or allow her kids to eat peanut butter because “it was invented by a Negro homosexual”. (She did at least say ‘Negro’.)
That boycott was as inaccurate as stupid as the other one. While Carver was probably a homosexual and was definitely black, and though I’ve seen him credited as its inventor on everything from placemats to history books, he was not and never claimed to be the inventor of peanut butter. Variants of it were in use well before his birth, including as a protein source/meat substitute for people who had lost their teeth.

But anyway, we were taught in school that “GWC came up with hundreds of uses for the peanut. Turn the page.” Big whoop, good for him.

We weren’t taught WHY he came up with hundreds of uses for the peanut, and that makes the story far more interesting and important and of especial interest to Alabama (one of the largest peanut producing areas of the country). It was a rare combination of altruism, academia and brilliance (three things that don’t often go together).
By the 20th century Alabama and most of the other Deep South states had been growing cotton for more than a century and the soil was pretty much ruined. The farms were producing less and less cotton, the boll weevil had several times destroyed what was grown (which bankrupted big planters and made sharecroppers and poor farmers literally go hungry and in many instances die)/ The the opening of the Suez made Indian and West African and Asian cotton a lot cheaper to Britain and other European mills, so most of the American cotton trade was only with northern and midwestern textile mills, which meant a lot less was being bought which meant that it was not bringing anywhere near what it once had (at the dawn of the Civil War good quality Alabama and Georgia cotton brought more than $1.00 per pound- by World War I the same quality cotton was bringing about a dime a pound) which dispossessed many people altogether and made those who were still in the game work harder and harder for subsistence and even after toiling 15 hour days in the Alabama sun (no light task) the boll weevil or an early freeze or other circumstances totally of their control could still kill the crops.
Carver wanted a solution. He did soil analysis and other research to find out what other crops would do well on the same land. Peanuts grow great in the soil of South Alabama, south Georgia and panhandle Florida, they’re less destructive to the soil, they’re high yield, etc… They were already being grown on a very limited scale, but their only real uses was as boiled/parched snacks and for peanut butter, and the South was already producing enough to supply the demand for food (see “high yield”) so it wasn’t lucrative to grow more. Carver found his hundreds of uses for peanuts not because he got a woody for JIF but strictly to create a market that would allow peanut farming to explode as a cash crop. He did, soon everybody in southwest Georgia and south Alabama was growing the legumes, which meant that fewer were growing cotton which made the demand for southern cotton go up a bit, etc. etc. etc… Carver finding hundreds of uses for peanuts wasn’t just a piece of trivia, it literally saved the lives of thousands and thousands and thousands of southern landowners, tenant farmers and sharecroppers of all races, in reward for which he was given the title “nigger”.

It’s so ironic that uneducated farm families who owed their livelihood and their existence to this man would not have let him through the front door of their shack and would have taken his seat on a bus without a second thought. And it’s ironic that hundreds of thousands of students in Georgia and Alabama and Florida whose family didn’t starve strictly because of his research know him only as “that old black guy in the white coat who invented peanut butter” when they owe their lives to him (even if their family didn’t grow peanuts). When I worked at Georgia Southwestern University, which is in the very heart of peanut country (Jimmy Carter lived 9 miles away), I taught a course to students who had never even heard of him.

Anyway, sorry to hijack, but while it takes longer to explain than “He invented a synthetic fiber out of peanut stalks… wooooo-hooo!”, it casts his research in a huge other light, and this is but one of a gazillion of examples of this. We were taught that Hearst got us into the Spanish American war to boost newspaper sales (not true- at least not entirely true), that Teddy Roosevelt led a charge up San Juan Hill (but not why), that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and World War I began and America sent troops (I think I missed some connected dots in there) and other things that were totally disconnected facts for which we had no use for explanation. I blame much of it on the delivery to the coaches or whoever else was free that period of the history classes.

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PS- Forgot to add to the already too lengthy above- peanuts didn’t just grow in the depleted by cotton soil, it replenished it by putting the nitrogen that had been leeched back into the dirt. Some farmers alternated the same fields with peanuts and cotton in different years.

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Lived in a town in Oklahoma where a lady I knew who had a maser’s degree in history couldn’t get a job teaching history at the local high school apparantly because all the positions teaching history were filled BY coaches, and she misunderstood what she was told). That said, , we did have a guy teach history for a semester who worked on nuclear related stuff in the Navy and apparantly later went on to be a hippie of some sort. The next year he was teaching the Government class (go figure :smiley: )

In any case, all of the coaches I took history classes from happend to have minored in History in college, for whatever that is worth.