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 StygianBeach wrote:

 welshhoppo wrote:

But we have had nations that rise and fall in the blink of an eye. Like if you go back 200 years, there have been several different Germany's. The Holy Roman Empire, Kingdom of Prussia, The German Empire, The Weimar Republic of Germany, The Third Reich and finally the German Republic.

You left out the West and East German divide and then finally the reunited German Republic. The German Socialist Republic was quite a different place to the western part.

I was doing it from memory. Most people only pay attention to German history between 1929-1945.

 welshhoppo wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 welshhoppo wrote:
It's like that old saying. " In Europe, 100 miles is a long distance, but in America 100 years is a long time."

This is a pretty apt way of putting it. 100 years here might as well be 10,000 years for all practical purposes, while in Europe 100 miles might take you into a whole different nation, or possibly even cross 2 or 3 in some instances, with different languages and cultures in each whereas some Americans commute that far every day. One of my co-workers commutes 86 miles round trip every day

If anyone around here said they commuted that distance people would think they were mad. About 25 miles is about the max limit of sanity. But sometimes travelling 5 miles can take an hour if the traffic is bad.

But we have had nations that rise and fall in the blink of an eye. Like if you go back 200 years, there have been several different Germany's. The Holy Roman Empire, Kingdom of Prussia, The German Empire, The Weimar Republic of Germany, The Third Reich and finally the German Republic.

I used to commute about 70 miles round trip to work, but by train and tube not car. It's more the waste of time and expense and mental effort than the distance that is the problem. Commuting nearly anywhere in London takes at least half an hour each way, but anyone sensible is on public transport reading a book.

My current commute is 1 minute each way, consequently I am getting a lot less reading done.

My old church back home was built on a site of worship dating back to the 500's, and we have pubs at home that existed longer that the US has.

Sounds interesting - where is that?

Ireland.

When you think your having a drink in same pub king Charles the first surrendered in during English civil war when traveling about the country.

Amazing if walls could talk. That place has a interesting history.

Still a pub to this day.

The timescale.difference is certainly something, though the sheer amount of events that public school US history ignores is still staggering. It's surprising to me that they manage to go over so little during the course of a year. On top of that there's the whitewashing, which I assume is present in Europe but I really don't know the extent. Aside from Vietnam the US is always a good guy and wars where we weren't are glazed over or not mentioned at all. In fact, the general idea of the US having basically been in armed conflict for the entirety of its existence isn't brought up. Thankfully at least some of the bigger dark spots are still covered, slavery, native Americans, and cold war imperialism come to mind. Once you get into college history classes though it seems to me that it's a crapshoot; you could get a really good unbiased perspective all the way to something worse than a high school version.

Something that I suspect Brits will find unsurprising but mildly entertaining is that the general stance on the Revolutionary War is that the US was a victim of the big bad king, did nothing to provoke the oppressive actions they were subject to, and totally succeeded in defeating the British on military terms.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
the sheer amount of events that public school US history ignores is still staggering.

This is true the world over, there are simply too much ground to cover. When I was at School I did History for the whole period of my secondary education (I took it as 2 electives at different levels) but the range of topics were very narrow and missed out what were to me are more important events-we covered the English Plantagent kings in detail for some reason but didn't go anywhere near the Scottish wars of independence, the reformation, the war of the 3 kingdoms or even the second world war. Just about the only Scottish history we got was Malcom Canmore falling of his horse at Queensferry and a bit about Culloden. This was in Scotland.

This was 20 years ago though so hopefully things have changed for the better now.

The history taught at school depends on the national curriculum and how it is interpreted by the teachers.

When I was at school, a long time ago, I was taught a fairly traditional English/British history that began with the Norman Conquest, went through the dates of the kings, mentioning significant events in Britain and Europe (who could ever forget the Diet of Worms?) and brought me quickly up to the end of the 19th century. I don't remember the 20th century being covered in any detail, surprisingly. Ancient history was covered in the context of learning Latin, and mostly involved Caesar and Roman history.

My wife, having been educated in Japan, was taught the history of the world starting from its formation 5 billion years ago up to the modern day, with a strong emphasis on Japanese history, which conveniently has little interaction with the rest of the world until the mid 19th century. Time ran out by the First World War, meaning the events of the 1920s and WW2 were never studied. This apparently is common in Japanese schools.

My daughter has benefitted from a more modern, international education, partly from having spent some years at an international school. In the UK, rather than a UK-centric course, she has been taught various bits of world history such as the formation of the first Chinese Imperial State, as a means of comparative social history. This is because the modern UK national curriculum has been significantly improved compared to my day in the 1960s and 70s. It is much less about learning a sequence of "significant" dates.

 welshhoppo wrote:

If anyone around here said they commuted that distance people would think they were mad. About 25 miles is about the max limit of sanity. But sometimes travelling 5 miles can take an hour if the traffic is bad.

My dad's daily commute is 110 miles. My mom's is about 50 miles. Both take about 2 hours in total. Mine is about 3 miles and it's faster to run to the gym near the office, shower and change there, then make the 1.5 block walk to the office than it is to drive or rely on public transit.

See, if I was to travel 55 miles in one direction, I'd end up in the wrong country.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
The timescale.difference is certainly something, though the sheer amount of events that public school US history ignores is still staggering.

Man, that's a thread unto itself.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

Aside from Vietnam the US is always a good guy and wars where we weren't are glazed over or not mentioned at all.

In the district I grew up in WW1 didn't get mentioned until high school (when history* was an elective), at least outside of "This is a thing that happened." Vietnam got pretty much the same treatment, so did the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American war. The latter I find especially egregious, given how important William Randolph Hearst is to this country.



*Or "social studies" as it was called.

 welshhoppo wrote:
See, if I was to travel 55 miles in one direction, I'd end up in the wrong country.

The joke my dad always makes is that he does exactly that. 55 miles west of Chicago is empty Illinois and the culture is massively different.

Though there is a glider airport where he works, and a cool train museum, so I can't totally hate on the place.

I find the Mexican American war interesting in the glazed-over regard because the US got off to a rocky start but then more or less kicked ass by the end, so much so that it could have annexed the entirety of Mexico had it wanted to (we settled for California and Texas). Yet it gets ignored because we pretty much provoked that conflict because we knew we could win.

You may as well say the same about how you took our Cuba and the Phillipines.

I mean, blowing up your own ship and then blaming us for it? That's Illuminati levels of conspiration. Its also what my crazily conspiranoic history teacher thaught us.

Funnily, Spanish history classes depend on who's in power.
If its the Socialist Workers' (socialdemocrats) you will skip the golden age of the empire and go straight to how we lost it. Special attention paid to the Armada Invencible's fate but none at all to the Royal Navie's bloodiest nose ever. Admiral Vernon is probably happy in his grave that we don't know about it.
If the Populars (consevatives) are in charge, you will get lots of Reconquista (because killing brown people) and war of succession (because absolutism is cool) and some Independence War (that's the Peninsular Campaign of the Napoleonic Wars) on top.

And when you get to the 20th century...
The Socialists will give you lots on the worker's movements and the republicans during the civil war but will have you dragged across the whole misery of fascism for 3/4 of the school year.

The Populars will skim over most of the early 20th century, stop a moment over the few things fascism managed (like getting Ike to hug Franco) and go straight to the transition and how "hey guys, we were just keeping the country okay, now you can vote again, all of that dictatorship was just a misunderstanding because someone gave us the wrong calendar, we thought we had 40 years, not 4".

Not sure if other countries' history curriculum is that influence by politics tho.

I do remember being very disappointed with the History lessons I received in the late 80s and early 90s in the UK, a bit of WW1 & 2, a list of royalty and some guff about the hanseatic league and lace making.
I may be doing my old history teacher a disservice, he was a nice chap, but I was stunningly uninterested in Belgium at the time.

 aldo wrote:
Funnily, Spanish history classes depend on who's in power.
If its the Socialist Workers' (socialdemocrats) you will skip the golden age of the empire and go straight to how we lost it. Special attention paid to the Armada Invencible's fate but none at all to the Royal Navie's bloodiest nose ever. Admiral Vernon is probably happy in his grave that we don't know about it.
If the Populars (consevatives) are in charge, you will get lots of Reconquista (because killing brown people) and war of succession (because absolutism is cool) and some Independence War (that's the Peninsular Campaign of the Napoleonic Wars) on top.

And when you get to the 20th century...
The Socialists will give you lots on the worker's movements and the republicans during the civil war but will have you dragged across the whole misery of fascism for 3/4 of the school year.

The Populars will skim over most of the early 20th century, stop a moment over the few things fascism managed (like getting Ike to hug Franco) and go straight to the transition and how "hey guys, we were just keeping the country okay, now you can vote again, all of that dictatorship was just a misunderstanding because someone gave us the wrong calendar, we thought we had 40 years, not 4".

Not sure if other countries' history curriculum is that influence by politics tho.

I'm not so sure I can agree with this. It's 100% true that the political party in power usually goes straight to modify the education laws in order to suit their political views and tastes, but that said what's taught at History lessons at school doesn't change much. The current content has been mostly written in stone for a while now, so in the end what's taught and what's not it's mostly up to the teacher. The education laws change so quickly the textbooks simply cannot be updated accordingly, so they remain mostly the same over the years, just with minor changes to accomodate new events (like 11/9, Irak war, etc.).

 Korinov wrote:
The education laws change so quickly the textbooks simply cannot be updated accordingly, so they remain mostly the same over the years, just with minor changes to accomodate new events (like 11/9, Irak war, etc.).

Wow, crazy kids learn about the New York attack on the11th September in history class these day. I wonder what they are taught on the subject.

 Korinov wrote:

I'm not so sure I can agree with this. It's 100% true that the political party in power usually goes straight to modify the education laws in order to suit their political views and tastes, but that said what's taught at History lessons at school doesn't change much. The current content has been mostly written in stone for a while now, so in the end what's taught and what's not it's mostly up to the teacher. The education laws change so quickly the textbooks simply cannot be updated accordingly, so they remain mostly the same over the years, just with minor changes to accomodate new events (like 11/9, Irak war, etc.).

The textbooks may be the same, but thanks to having too much to teach over too little time the government can get away with saying how much time gets devoted to each period.

 StygianBeach wrote:

 Korinov wrote:
The education laws change so quickly the textbooks simply cannot be updated accordingly, so they remain mostly the same over the years, just with minor changes to accomodate new events (like 11/9, Irak war, etc.).

Wow, crazy kids learn about the New York attack on the11th September in history class these day. I wonder what they are taught on the subject.

Basically that our government was stupid, got us into the Irak war and got kicked out after they lied (they claimed it had been the basques to keep people form thinking it had been a retaliation for the Irak war, but it didn't work) about the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

That's what my history book says. Of course half of it is basically a retelling of the first half from a Catalan point of view, other regions' textbooks may be more detailed.

American war of independence was taught. Very differently.

I was taught it was extremely close run thing until the French decided to assist in training amd Navy to counter the far larger Royal Navy.

US Navy was pretty small, effective but far smaller than forces Britain could bring to bear including 90-100 gun first rate ships of the line. Sorry USS Constitution its not gonna win against a ship with double your guns.

Spanish armarda
Ww2, convoys and the you boats. Yes we did do as part of allies
American Indian wars amd why white people bad.. I read further on google years later and far more interesting.

Kings. Henery 8th, but half I learned from Google, YouTube and tv to be honest.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The history taught at school depends on the national curriculum and how it is interpreted by the teachers.

When I did my 2 final years of high school I took a history subject where we had to read different authors and weigh up their different views. You could pass the exams if you just regurgitated some information, but if you wanted decent marks you actually had to say "Suchandsuch said blah blah while Whosesface suggests blah blah".

So the teacher's interpretation wasn't really relevant, they had to teach the curriculum in terms of the different view points of actual historians.

The reading list was huge for a high school subject though and it wasn't really targeted at the kids struggling to get through.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I find the Mexican American war interesting in the glazed-over regard because the US got off to a rocky start but then more or less kicked ass by the end, so much so that it could have annexed the entirety of Mexico had it wanted to (we settled for California and Texas). Yet it gets ignored because we pretty much provoked that conflict because we knew we could win.

It's even more bizarre because the Mexican-American War's outcome was a major contributing factor to the American Civil War. The thing I found most odd looking back at high school text books is how little they actually present analytic narratives. They treat history like a bullet pointed list of stuff that happened, rather than a long series of interwoven events.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 aldo wrote:
I mean, blowing up your own ship and then blaming us for it? That's Illuminati levels of conspiration. Its also what my crazily conspiranoic history teacher thaught us.

It's pretty certain now that the Maine blew up as an accident owing to a design flaw (fumes from the boilers spontaneously combusted, as fumes from bituminous coal are sometimes known to do, and ignited a magazine). There's even some evidence the US government suspect this at the time (other ships of the same class as the Maine got the problem suddenly fixed), but I guess we really wanted Cuba XD

Not sure if other countries' history curriculum is that influence by politics tho.

That's pretty interesting. We don't quite have that here, maybe because the Federal government has limited control over specifics and just sets general standards (and I don't know exactly how Spain's education system is structured), but local policy makers can have... quite an influence.

Not counting elementary school, my high school history class was very heavy on the early colonial era, French and Indian war, Revolutionary War, very light on War of 1812, and massive amounts on the causes of, and events leading up to the Civil War starting from Andrew Jackson. Our teacher was very specific that he wanted his students not to walk out of his class thinking that the Civil War was a single subject war like what is taught pretty commonly these days. Actually ticked off a couple of students who were hard headed about it because they grew up "knowing" that it was a single subject war and didn't want to hear about any other reasons.

We touched on WW1 and barely WW2 before the year ended. Was a very good class, put me in a good place for college history class which wasn't near as in detail but only required me to memorize all the presidents in order, because that's important in life.

I messaged someone about it, but 25 miles is a relatively short commute. I personally drive 17 miles one way in about 20 minutes because I like living out in the woods and not in a city. My co-worker drives an hour and a half one way usually around 100mph the whole way if traffic lets him. Funny enough he drives a Mini-cooper.

 LordofHats wrote:

Not sure if other countries' history curriculum is that influence by politics tho.

That's pretty interesting. We don't quite have that here, maybe because the Federal government has limited control over specifics and just sets general standards (and I don't know exactly how Spain's education system is structured), but local policy makers can have... quite an influence.

Those are the kinds of things to watch for, though. The whole creationism vs evolution thing where some want creationism to be taught (because feth the First Amendment). There's also the political spin that can subtly be applied to various things, too, like climate change and how we see other countries.

That's not even the thing that shocked me the most when the story came out. How the hell are you going to talk about the Constitution without talking about Jefferson? Come on Texas XD

 LordofHats wrote:
That's not even the thing that shocked me the most when the story came out. How the hell are you going to talk about the Constitution without talking about Jefferson? Come on Texas XD

In my history courses I learned more about Spain and Mexico than Britain. Britain was only concerned with immigrants from, and war with.

I did learn a good bit about the War of Northern Aggression though. ;-)

Col. Dash wrote:
Not counting elementary school, my high school history class was very heavy on the early colonial era, French and Indian war, Revolutionary War, very light on War of 1812, and massive amounts on the causes of, and events leading up to the Civil War starting from Andrew Jackson. Our teacher was very specific that he wanted his students not to walk out of his class thinking that the Civil War was a single subject war like what is taught pretty commonly these days. Actually ticked off a couple of students who were hard headed about it because they grew up "knowing" that it was a single subject war and didn't want to hear about any other reasons.

We touched on WW1 and barely WW2 before the year ended. Was a very good class, put me in a good place for college history class which wasn't near as in detail but only required me to memorize all the presidents in order, because that's important in life.

I messaged someone about it, but 25 miles is a relatively short commute. I personally drive 17 miles one way in about 20 minutes because I like living out in the woods and not in a city. My co-worker drives an hour and a half one way usually around 100mph the whole way if traffic lets him. Funny enough he drives a Mini-cooper.

I don't think it's completely inaccurate to say the American Civil War was about slavery. But it's kind of like saying that climate change is the world getting warmer; yes that's broadly true, but it is also a vast oversimplification.

Yet talk to a lot of people and they will ardently defend that that was the sole cause. Especially northerners in the US I have noticed.

And mainly southerners who exclaim that it wasn't about slavery. Funny how the truth is somewhere in between.

Hear that Democrats and Republicans? SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN

/rant

Col. Dash wrote:
Yet talk to a lot of people and they will ardently defend that that was the sole cause. Especially northerners in the US I have noticed.

That's because pretty much everything we can point to as a cause in the war ultimately circles back to the issue of slavery; States rights, Federal power, economics, cultural differences, politics, westward expansion, etc. Slavery stands at the center of all these issues. You could call it the sole cause and you're not wrong, but that would still be an oversimplification of the situation. Historians have accepted slavery as a foremost cause of the war, but we're still struggling to define how it got that bad, and how it was such a problem. The "how" of slavery, may well go beyond slavery itself.

It's not exactly uncommon for history education to be focused on the stuff thought to be important instead of all the things that lead up to it. Finnish history school books just about ignore the Swedish period even if we were a part of the Swedish Empire for long centuries before being conquered by Russia and made an autonomous Grand Duchy, for example. All the wars fought by Swedish kings led up to that moment, but it's not important for some reason.