I was surprised to learn that Zurich, Switzerland is believed to be one of the longest continuously-occupied cities on earth, going back to 3,000BC or even earlier.
And Squanto didn’t learn English from the people on the Mayflower; he had lived in England for some time. He just happened to be there when the Mayflower arrived.
Another big yawn. No big reveals there.
You mentioned your belief in a conspiracy theory about the Las Vegas massacre, so it may be that you tend to believe in them, but all the ink and pixels wasted speculating about whoever in the government secretly has JFK killed, or whatever other theory you may have, just doesn’t seem to have happened.
It is publicly known in the US that some Japanese American were held in internment camps during World War II.
What is less well known is that some German American and Italian Americans were held in camps as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Italian_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans
The 1918 pandemic is certainly discussed more in recent years (AIDS, Covid, etc. may account in part for that), but it was mostly forgotten for many decades after it happened. For a devastating event that affected 1/3 of the world’s population and killed >50-million, it’s puzzling it was not discussed for so long. These articles give reasons:
I’d been blissfully ignorant of any CTs about the Vegas shootings. Of course I assumed there were such; there always are since grifting the rubes is sooo profitable. Anyhow, wiki has this to say on the topic:
Which interestingly includes nothing about what @nearwildheaven alluded to earlier: some involvement with classified government material.
So I’m torn between wanting to know what wacky BS they were referring to, but also not wanting to launch a CT hijack in this thread.
I can’t think of any reason why Socorro, Alburquerque, and Sante Fe would be considered part of our national foundation myths. The American colonies that would eventually become the United States rebelled against Great Britan and the king of England not the king of Spain. The fact that the prodominent language was English and not Spanish is another good indiciation of why Sante Fe isn’t part of our foundational myth.
I saw this one in some book on how to win obscure bar bets. Poor John Hanson, mostly forgotton.
Squanto’s story is a great example of something we’d call “bullshit” on if he showed up in a work of fiction. So you’re telling me these colonist just happen to run into some dude who spent some time in England, speaks their language, and can also speak the language of a few other native groups in the area? This is just stretching my suspension of disbelief.
What about New York City? That was founded 20 years before Boston, too.
That is an oddity. New Amsterdam was already a good-sized city when we stole it from the Dutch. American popular culture rarely tells stories about the early years of the settlement. New York sprang into existence, from the forehead of Zeus, fully grown.
Maybe not part of our “foundational myths” in the sense of what was specifically part of the country when the DoI was signed, but certainly part of our foundational myths in the sense of, “This is what the country is now; how did we get here?”
FWIW, the history of Spanish colonization of North America is very much not memory holed if you grew up in the west, at least in my experience. We spent a lot of time in grade school learning about the Mission system, and there’s currently a fight going on over places named after Father Junipero Serra, who it turns out was kind of a shit to the locals.
I thought everyone in my generation read “Summer of My German Soldier”, or at least saw the T.V. movie with Kristy McNichol.
What about it? Most of us speak English rather than Dutch which I think is an excellent clue as to why New Amsterdam isn’t part of the national foundation myth. But if you can make a case for why it should be along with Jamestown and the Mayflower, I’m all ears.
I think you might have a different definition of foundational than I do. I hear foundational and I think origins, and Sante Fe doesn’t really belong in the origin story of the United States.
I went to school in Texas, and we covered the encomienda system in high school. But it’s been so long I don’t remember what I learned then and what I learned a few years later in college.
The sweetest of disasters.
Amen. When I did a report on this in grade school, the teacher said it sounded like it was a folk tale.
Another: a 1900 college football game results in the deadliest accident at a sporting event in U.S. history: Thanksgiving Day Disaster
And I thought everyone associated the Detroit Lions with the Thanksgiving Day disaster.
What I find interesting is how the events we do know have been recast into something else entirely.
A great example to me is American capitalism. It is branded as the epitome of self-made exceptionalism, names like Rockefeller, Ford, Gates, and JP Morgan taught to us at an early age. A nation forged from the determination and grit of men, free from tyranny and government intervention (until 1932), built on the principle of self reliance.
And yet… and yet…
It’s not that way at all. Dig deeper and you effectively find that the American government(s) exist to create markets as to funnel public money into private hands. The Erie Canal was the first true example of this, as it was successfully promoted by a man in prison for debt, Jesse Hawley. Jesse realized that only government investment would have saved his business, and others… seeing the opportunity for financial gain as well (especially in construction)… began to lobby the State of New York (and Dewitt Clinton) for the canal.
They succeeded, and the rest, as they say, is history. From the railroads receiving hundreds of thousands of acres of free land to John Rockefeller owning the PA State legislator to the development of the aircraft/computer/oil/financial/etc industries, using the power of government is the proven path to creating billions in wealth.
As I mentioned in another thread, my parents were unwitting beneficiaries of such a process. Because another company took an issue to the Supreme Court, and won, my parents sleepy little telephone directory distribution company rose to be the third largest in the industry. And then they lost it because the government also funded a shitload of the technology which, over 60+ years, became the iPhone.
And so it goes. And we are taught this, in schools - I don’t think I’ve mentioned anything truly ‘unknown’ in the above - and yet our conceptualization of what happened (which we are taught) is completely different from what actually happened (which we too are taught).
Anyway, you want to become a billionaire, use lawyers to take advantage of the government. Become Sears & Roebuck using the subsidized mail system. Become ATT and the Kingsbury Agreement and Bell Labs. Become Wilbur and Orville Wright, getting $70k of research free from the Smithsonian Institute to invent your plane. Become IBM and get those sweet, sweet, Nazi bucks.
Well, perhaps not that last. But if you want millions or billions in America, get some lawyers and have some minor laws changed in your favor. And don’t worry about that “self-made, small government” bullshit. That’s not how the game is played.
Can you say “SpaceX”? I knew you could.
Well that’s just it: traditional “American History” taught in grade schools focused on how the United States of America came to be founded and eventually control a major portion of the the North American continent. As such most such grade school history had a heavily Anglo-American nationalist focus, with everything else treated as incidental or a dead-end to USA history; and as a result the history texts tended to skip from Columbus directly to Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. At most they used to devote a few pages to the Conquistadores and explorers like de Soto and Coronado. Saint Augustine got basically a trivia question citation. If you lived in the Upper Midwest you got some overview of New France, French fur traders, explorers and missionaries, and the many francophone place names preserved there as far west as the Missouri river.
To properly explain how English-speaking peoples eventually colonized the New World would require at least an entire chapter in the history texts, but this would have to focus as much or more on European history between 1492 and 1607 as American.
Nitpick: “Summer of My German Soldier” is about an actual P.O.W.