Well, we did steal it. I don’t understand why that fact is so hard for some to admit. Sure, the Spanish stole it first, but it’s not like we gave it back to the inhabitants it was stolen from originally. Regardless, at this point, I think it’s safe to say that serious people believe the borders are pretty much permanent.
Boy, no kidding.
Heh. When my mom moved down here, she’d just finished the War of 1812 in Canadian school, and was just in time for it in U.S. school. She says it took her some time to understand that it was the same war.
I’ve always gone by their first and last name.
Ah, no response, I see.
When I was attending high school in Canada in the early '80s, the history curriculim read as if written by someone earnestly reading this thread, taking its lessons to heart, and attempting as best they could to carry them into practice.
Lots of stuff about racism, sexism, the plight of the native Canadians, the struggles of labour, plight of immigrants, the struggle for woman’s rights, internment of Japanese Canadians - there were a bunch of “modules” I recall, and each week we earnestly studied someone’s struggle and plight.
Only one problem:it was dead boring. Totally, completely, absolutely deadly boring. Everyone hated Canadian history, which seemed to be nothing but a kind of whine writ large.
It was only after high school that I discovered that Canadian history was actually very interesting and exciting, not to mention wierd. I mean, a country whose earliest history was irrevocably shaped by a fashion in hats? What’s not to like? 
The experience of the deadly dullness of history teaching wasn’t confined to one teacher or one school, it seems to have been a common refrain among people of my era. Canadian history is I think undergoing a bit of a recovery from that.
Mexico would never have existed in the first place, if the Spanish hadn’t conquered it. Even today, Mexico is ruled by a predominately white elite. It is both amusing and disgusting to hear Latin Americans accusing gringos of perfidy.
Interestingly, the same English/First Nations person in Canada is a metis, which is basically the same word as the Mexican one, only French.
I don’t really know what the connotations of mestizo and metis are in their respective countries, but the most common word that used to be used for a US English/Native American was “half-breed”, which denotes the exact same thing that mestizo and metis do, but connotes the pejorative. So much so that it’s essentially gone the way of “ni–er”, “kike”, “spic” and “slant”.
On the other hand, I don’t think our numbers of mixed-race Native Americans were ever as large as Mexico’s or Canada’s.
And the US would not had existed if the British hadn’t conquered the original states.
Really, the reason why we have to consider points like that irrelevant is that historical tu quoques are even more ridiculous when coming from colonial times. The point is not that we should return any territory, it is too late for that. The robbery of the northern part of Mexico is just a demonstration of the saying that justice delayed is justice denied.
Indeed, history is not pretty.
One of my junior high school teachers lived in such a camp as a child. He was a science teacher, but the history teachers would have him in for a guest lecture on the interment camps. He made it very real.
Probably has more than a little to do with my anger over Gitmo.
To the OP…I don’t worry so much about the books. A good teacher can supplement them, and a bad teacher can skip over the ugly parts.
Sounds like things swung too far in the opposite direction from when I studied Canadian history some years earlier. My classes in post-Confederation Canadian history consisted mainly of debates and discussions among Parliamentarians on what to do about what they felt were the concerns facing the country. As might be imagined, very little time was spent on the actual events, but much time was spent studying debates and discussions that took place in Parliament and the legislatures. For example, I recall that we spent a week studying WWII and Canada’s role in it, but five or six weeks on the uproar in Parliament over the Conscription Crisis. This was the way most topics were dealt with: the Riel Rebellion, the Winnipeg General Strike, our role in the Suez Crisis, the FLQ crisis of 1970. Saying our classes consisted mainly of a teacher saying “In the XYZ event, this happened, then this happened, then this happened. Any questions? No? Good. Now let’s look at how Macdonald/Borden/Laurier/King/
Pearson/Trudeau dealt with it in Parliament…” would not be too far from the truth. Regardless, it was just as boring as your experience seems to be.
I cannot answer the OP, but I wonder if Malthus is onto something–whether one’s views as to a history textbook’s accuracy are colored by the concerns of the day. Obviously, in my day, it was important to show that we were in capable and competent hands and that reasoned debate and discussion at high levels could solve any problem. In his day, it was important to show the struggle and plight of certain groups who were treated badly by those same capable and competent people discussing things at high levels. Both views are historically accurate, but the differing emphasis might cause some in his class to state that my textbooks were inaccurate, while my classmates might state that Malthus’ textbooks were inaccurate. Something to consider, anyway.
It’s not confined to Canadians, either, or to kids who were taught history the way you were. American history classes tend to be very boosterish on the USA, and our kids think history is boring, too. James Loewen seemed to think a less rah-rah approach might make history classes less boring, but it looks like it ain’t necessarily so.
That’s the point, in case you didn’t realize it. Mexico is over 50% mestizo. The Spanish and native peoples interbred sexually and culturally to a much greater extent than what happened in the US. I don’t know what a mixed anglo/American-Indian is called because I’m honestly not sure if there are enough of them to have a name.
I caught that point, but I think I lost it while I was typing that response. :smack:
Personally, I suspect the problem might lie in the very attempt to illustrate some sort of didactic lesson by way of teaching history, particularly one where the message has been approved as socially redeeming from the top-down.
When people say ‘the history texts are inaccurate’ what they often really complaining about is an emphasis that they do not agree with - the books I remember at least generally did not contain actual untruths.
My point for discussion is this: that any teaching of history from the point of view of illustrating a didactic lesson is going to dull down the material, and it pretty well doesn’t matter what the point the writers are attempting to make is - ‘history as a moral lesson in the value of democracy and patriotism’ is just as dull as ‘history as a moral lesson in the value of equal rights and multiculturalism’ or ‘history as a moral lesson in the value of reasoned discourse among wise parliamentarians’.
Somehow the experience of having history used to shove home some sort of lesson in this way removes much of the zest for learning it. My own approach would be that these lessons and many more besides (sometimes contradictory ones) should emerge from the material naturally. People are much more interesting in all of their paradoxical glory than as starched archetypes …
You should try comparing the population of Native Americans in the regions that became the original thirteen colonies and later the rest of America east of the Mississippi to that of the regions which later became present-day Mexico.
English colonists certainly did on occasion marry and interbreed with the natives, however there were far fewer natives to begin with. When Spain started to colonize/conquer its American Empire it essentially had to contend with large, established civilizations with cities and towns spread all throughout the countryside.
When the English first landed they were essentially landing on the shores of a very unsettled region with only scattered tribes (comparatively.) There was much less reason for interaction and assimilation. In the case of the Spanish it’d be a situation like if the Spanish had invaded England, there were so many people that assimilation and integration would have simply had to occur.
The Spanish were dealing with a much higher population/concentration of natives. Furthermore the historical record seems to indicate that a large portion of natives who lived in the areas first colonized by English settlers were wiped out by European diseases. While disease definitely spread through the Aztec Empire and through the many N.A. nations that lived in the region controlled by the Aztecs in the Massachusetts Bay area the estimated effect was an 80-90% reduction in population.
I’m not trying to white wash anything and say that English settlers didn’t force Native Americans from their lands, or that the United States didn’t get even more aggressive with that process and continually pushed them further and further west (and eventually into reservations.) That all happened, we know it did. However that’s the sort of thing that was only possible because we were dealing with a much much smaller number of scattered native groups than the Spanish were. For the Spanish to have done what we did would be like the United States trying to push all the Germans into reservations after WWII. Good luck with a country that big and that densely populated, it’s just not manageable.
I don’t really think you can morally weigh one society against another, I don’t believe that societies can be moral or immoral, only individual people. I know that the white men who lead the charge into the New World were pretty much all to a one ready to put their own interests ahead of that of the natives. The Spanish brutally murdered and enslaved their fair share of Native Americans, and in many ways the manner in which they dealt with natives was harsher than that of the English because of the fact the Spanish were trying to suppress and control a much larger population and thus they felt much more threatened personally than English settlers did.
I also want to add that we didn’t “steal” anything from the Mexicans in the Mexican-American war, we conquered it. Conquest is something all societies engaged in up until World War II. Conquest can be seen as no more immoral than competition between business.
Creepy typo! Internment camps contain individuals detained more-or-less temporarily.*
Interment is burial.
*I recognize that sometimes the camps become very long-term, but the use of the word internment is intended to connote a temporary period. The “temporariness” might be well-intentioned or an outright lie, of course.
You know, I think you’re right. And that would explain why history is so much more boring than classes like science, or math- most schools, at least, don’t try to teach those classes as any kind of moral lesson. Literature is boring too when presented as a moral lesson (which happened at least with some works in my high school English classes).
The Powhatan Confederation wasn’t on the scale of the Incan or Aztec empires, but it can’t be called “an unsettled region.”
Bear in mind that some scholars contend that the relative “emptiness” of North America at the time of the English colonization was due to its having been very recently depopulated by introduced epidemic disease that had spread northward from the Spanish conquests.
Concur. I always say history is like the dramatic stories we see in movies and television, except it happened to real people and influenced everything about our world. It can be every bit as entertaining as popular culture, but it has the added advantage of being real.
Sucking the interest out of history is a longstanding academic pursuit.
I suspect the reason was not to cover anything up, but because it would take too much time to explain the need for these tables to kids today who grow up with graphing calculators. I don’t think Eckert and Mauchly were DoD employees, though the funding came from there - but so did most development funding at the time.
My wife wrote a piece of a high school biology text, and the combination of tight word limits and piles of stuff you have to include make it impossible to add any interesting digressions. I think it is one reason why textbooks today are so bad.