As an American who learned certain ‘facts’ about my own country’s history in school, and later discovered they weren’t all correct… I’m curious what students in China and Russia learn about US history that is not mentioned in mainstream American history textbooks.
All input welcome.
I would like to know too, plus what did you learn in school that had to be unlearned?
I can’t speak for the OP but U.S. high school textbooks tend to greatly overstate the U.S. military contributions in the European front during WWII. They greatly understate the hell that was the Russia (then a U.S. ally) versus Germany part of the conflict. It isn’t ignored completely. It is just usually presented in a greatly distorted way.
I hear that a lot, but when I took AP history back in the 80’s what we learned was “Here are the social, political and economic issues that resulted in World War II. Here are the arguments for an against using the atom bomb. Here are the social, political, and economic results of World War II. What? you want to know about the war itself? That was just Armies fighting each other, nothing interesting there.” We spent a lot more time discussing Lend/Lease and internment camps than D-Day.
Did some of you actually spend time learning about offensives and battles and stuff like that?
I had to unlearn everything I thought I knew about the War of 1812 … The Master’s article “Did Canada win the War of 1812?” was all news to me … I’m still ashamed of myself …
The bias in the teaching of US history lies not so much in the inclusion of untruths, but the exclusion of truths, germane and relevant to the big picture…
I have learned more from the History channel than I did in school, but I can’t remember having to undo anything my mind was directed to in the school books, but then again I grew up in the great state of Texas.
I wouldn’t say “distorted”, so much as incomplete. US textbooks typically describe it from an extremely US-centric view, and don’t really go into the relative contributions of the various nations.
This makes it look like maybe the US carried the war in terms of fighting, which was not true in Europe, but was true in the Pacific.
Overall, the textbooks I had tended to talk about the pre-war circumstances that led to war, and the post-war consequences and fallout. What mention of fighting there was, usually revolved around how it drew the US into the fight. Once all the major belligerents were in the fight, they all skipped ahead to the end for the most part.
Which makes some sense, except that it being the Cold War, they skipped over the part where Russia was devastated and consequently became somewhat paranoid about invasion from the West. In some sense, the Soviets were more afraid of NATO than vice-versa; from what I’ve read, a lot of their forces in East Germany and Czechoslovakia were more there for pre-emptive attacks or buffering in case of Western aggression, rather than a dagger poised to carry communism to the West if we let our guard down.
Isn’t that true of most countries; that their schools teach their national history first and emphasize their country’s contribution to a larger event like World War II?
nm- wrong thread.
This, and the fact that we would have to stop teaching just about everything else if we wanted to teach a comprehensive and unbiased history to students. Even professional historians specialize greatly.
Makes sense, if we wanted to know the Russian role in WWII, we should study Russian history.
Anecdotally, when I was growing up in Russia in the 90s, America was regarded as a young country with no culture by our English teacher (who had plenty of ties with/respect for the British, however).
Americans usually don’t have the faintest idea about the British point of view at the time of the American War of Independence.
In fact, most Americans don’t seem to think that that the British even had any point of view, other than “Let’s oppress the poor American colonists because we’re bad guys, and that’s what bad guys do.”
But be sure that there are always two sides to every story, and the British side was far from being unreasonable. Too long to go into here, though.
I started to type up a response, yesterday, but was hoping that someone with actual knowledge of the OP’s topic would answer.
The best I could do was go to the Russian Wikipedia and see what it says (using Google Chrome’s auto-translate - which seems to be quite good):
I don’t know how much the Wikipedia follows the Russian educational system, but it’s certainly slanted towards a pro-Russian view. Nothing seems to be overtly counterfactual (from a quick glance), but it will fail to mention the questionable activities of Russia while playing up any minor thing that the US might have done. E.g., it claims that the US made a personal promise to Gorbachev to cease expanding NATO in 1991, and links the Ukrainian crisis to the continued expansion of that (rather than to the Ukraine’s plan to enter the EU).
It states that the US is trying to maintain dominance of the world, and spread “democracy”, though it seems to accept that we’re largely doing so through finances and diplomacy, not military might.
But mostly, it seems to insert the occasional quote from Putin or whoever else - regardless of whether it really fits the context of the topic at hand - to remind people to distrust the US or whatever else. E.g.:
It is hardly possible to call US policy towards Russia responsible and cautious, she irresponsibly aggressive" ( Paul Craig Roberts , July 2009)
It is alarming that the military intervention in the internal conflicts that flare up in other countries, it has become commonplace for the United States. Does this long-term interests of America? I doubt it. Millions of people around the world increasingly relate to America not as a model of democracy, and as a country, relying solely on brute force for nailing coalition under the slogan “who is not with us is against us” - Vladimir Putin
Which is exactly what Americans think about the “point of view” of any Islamist country in general and so-called “terrorists” in particular, right up to this hour.
To be fair, I was educated in British schools and I **also **have no real idea what the British point of view at the time was. Because of course British history concentrates on events in Britain.
I’ll say that I found it pretty confusing to go through my first history class and hear about the dastardly British and their various Acts meant to screw the colonists, and then about their nefarious actions culminating in the War of 1812, and then to find out that less than a century later, they were our staunch allies and have been ever since.
Of course, I imagine a French child might have the same issue- nearly a millenium of Anglo-French warfare taught in history class, and then suddenly the Entente Cordiale and solid friendship ever since.
Heck, the enmity between the US and Germany, or US and Japan, during WWII was even greater than that between the US and Britain ever was, and within a half-century they were both close friends as well.
As for the status of Britain during the American Revolution, it’s not often mentioned that large parts of Britain itself had a similar or worse position with regards to taxation and representation than the New World colonies did. At the time, it was common for regions to be “represented” by appointed officials who didn’t come from those regions, and the colonies were subject to much less tax than Britain proper.
In the US, you will learn that Germany attacked Russia in 1941. You will not learn that it was not only Germany but Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Italy, Finland, and fascist detachments from all over occupied Europe. You will learn that the US and Britain fought the Germans in North Africa, invaded Italy, and landed in France in 1944 and won the war in 1945.
Less than a year later, we are told, the Russians, who had lost 25 million people and whose country west of the Volga was in ruins, was now preparing to launch a war against the relatively unscathed forces of the US, now the mightiest industrial power in history armed with the atomic bomb, Britain, and France, which had suffered almost no losses in the war.