I could not correct this in time:
I meant to say that president Polk was felling insulted that Mexico did not sell the land to the US.
You see, that was supposed to be an offer that the Mexicans could not refuse.
Polk got elected with five campaign promises.
So I don’t know how offended he really was by anything. And definitely it wasn’t much of a request.
From the history text book:
The bold part is in the text book, and notice that that was just for California. Might as well take it and the rest for less money once you have them at gun point.
Sorry if the German student I was speaking with was incorrect on the topic. I just remember my astonishment toward the event. He stated that his school hadn’t focused on that time period and people rather forget about the events in the time period. I didn’t mean to “lie” as was stated in one post. I am pleased to hear that that isn’t so.
I feel history has a tendency to repeat itself wether or know we know of it; not an excuse however. I think that absolute power yields the ignorance of the masses. Checks and balances just aren’t balancing in this case.
In my high school, the main world history teacher was also the psychology/sociology one, as well as the person in charge of the student body, PTA, and various things like that. No, she wasn’t gifted, she was quite the opposite, and had only a cursory understanding of world history. She used to give out packets of word puzzles and shit photocopied from God knows where and tell us to do them while she sat and did something else (the same largely happened in psychology as well). I remember quite a few days when I’d get bored/pissed off and just start teaching, especially 20th century American history and all the French revolution stuff. She never cared/said a word about me taking over the class, and I never considered my high school education as anything but a joke.
Brent, I didn’t say you were lying, but either your exchange student lied to you or was painfully ignorant when he told you that the Holocaust isn’t taught – or is forgotten.
Don’t take my word for it; here is an excerpt from an official report (Unterricht ueber Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust – education about National Socialism and the Holocaust) by the conference of the ministers of education (2005). I have replaced the German umlauts with an accepted substitute (ae, ue, oe) and a special form of the “s” (the “ß”) with “ss” to make sure that all characters are displayed properly:
The gist of it: the Holocaust is part of the official and mandatory curriculum for schools in all the states of the Federal Republic of Germany during the 9th and 10th form; it is taught in more detail in the following forms to deepen the students’ understanding of its context.
That a minority of schools fails to follow the curriculum is quite possible – but that’s far from the claim that it isn’t taught.
The two most probable explanations, however, are that a) he lied to you or b) he shut down his brain in the classes he wasn’t interested in. Alright, maybe the last one is the most likely alternative.
Okay this I did not know. Which one?
So when the USA attacks, invades and steals it is justified because the other country was not perfect and had done something wrong in its past? That would explain a lot of American history.
I’m a former history teacher and a liberal, but Loewen’s book is bad history. As to the larger point, no competent history teacher is leaving out the warts of American history these days. If anything, those things are over-taught to the detriment of other issues.
Besides, as others have mentioned, the larger issue is that there is so much teachers have to get through that they can’t really linger on anything but the biggest events: i.e. the revolution or the civil war.
Not just the Spanish conquest. English and French ships were stopping on the Eastern seaboard and interacting with the natives for 100 years before any permanent settlement was established.
This is obviously wrong. What year did that German exchange student go to German school? What kind of school? I spent one whole year - 10th form - on 3 Reich in history class. However, we weren’t shown the concentration camp movies, I saw those in the US history class. Maybe the student meant that?
Since some mentioned the “Bay of pigs” incident, I wonder: those history books that mention the Vietnam war, how many call it a just war, and how many show the lies surrounding it?
Similar, how many average adult Americans know that the US started the whole Cuba-rockets incident in the 60s by stationing rockets into Turkey pointing at the USSR (same distance as from Cuba to the US) and the Soviets only wanted to restore the previous balance?
I’d say very few high school history classes get this far, or aren’t rushing like mad to finish by the time they get to any discussion of Vietnam or communist Cuba.
The Pemmican War of 1814.
Because having multiple, consensual affairs with groupies is the same as banging a woman you own as property. :rolleyes:
What both the left and right typically get wrong about Sally Hemmings is that she wasn’t a black woman.
She was a slave, of course, but she was a white woman with a tiny bit of African ancestry. That’s the great thing about American slavery. You could own a hot white chick, and bang her at will!
(By great, I mean, obscene and disgusting, of course.)
True.
Point taken.
Polk definitely got us a lot of land out of that deal.
I know my Social Studies class in high school (in Canada) never got as far as Vietnam. We did mostly European history and only covered the 20th century up to WWII before the end of the school year.
Heck, I took a course in university called 20th Century Warfare, and we barely covered Vietnam. The vast majority of the semester covered the Russo-Japanese war, WWI, WWII, and the Korean War. Only very rushed on the last couple days of class did we cover the Vietnam War, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and the First Gulf War.
Well it’s worse i’n’t? Sort of like burglary vs armed robbery…
For my own experience, I didn’t learn most of these things until after high school, but history wasn’t my favorite class at the time, and of course supplemental information is generally more memorable. I don’t think things were revisionist so much as just watered down. I suspect that the myths that I learned at a very early age were not actually from class but were from word of mouth or popular culture. The only two unorthodox things that stand out in my mind from before college/discovery channel/internet were
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my mom’s friend wrote a book about the average Russian workers when I was in Junior High and a few years before the fall of the Berlin wall when everyone was still scared of nuclear MAD. This opened up my mind to the idea that the Russian people were pretty ordinary and not scary and it was only the Russian government that was actually potentially scary. Which led to me reexamining other prejudices I had.
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In doing research for a report on Eli Whitney I discovered that the popular myth of him inventing the cotton gin was not exactly true.
I don’t know if the war of 1812 was ever covered - if it was I was day dreaming the entire time. I wouldn’t even know it existed if I didn’t later learn from my family that I’m descended from a famous Canadian mythic hero of that conflict.
Chinese history school texts are a real trip, especially ww2, in which the Chinese apparently soundly and mostly singlehandedly defeated Japan and were just about to conquer it outright when the Americans dropped the A-bomb purely to try and take all the credit for the victory.
Of course, in reality, Japan’s major problem in China was controlling the huge territory and terrain that they captured (a lot of it at first taken with barely any resistance) and not the Chinese ground forces, which were split between the KMT and Communists. The two factions spent almost as much time fighting each other as they did fighting the Japanese. China’s main contribution to the defeat of the Japanese was in tying up a lot of their military force in trying to hold onto a vast captured territories in China while at the same time trying to beat back the US advances in the Pacific. The Japanese pulled troops out of China not because they had lost hope of prevailing against Chinese forces there, but because they were desperate to stop the US advance and couldn’t do both at once.
Errr, 3/4ths of Japans army and more than half of their airforce was tied up in China. There was a good chunck in Burma againts the British and the rest against the Yanks. The war against the US was mostly a naval war. At least until the Phillipines Campaign of 44-45.