Our country has one of the richest, most detailed histories in the world. Why don't we teach it?

And this includes Canada - since we have shared so much together.

You have the story of the Acadians who became the Cajuns
You have the story of the Buffalo Soldiers
You have the story of the California Missions
You have the story of the Civil War, reconstruction and re-admittance
You have the story of how California once 'was' and island
You have the story of Hellen Keller, Eugene Debs and Joe Hill
You have the story of the Roosevelts, the Kennedys and the Bushes

There is such a rich tapestry of history in our country - one that could rival anything in Europe - why don't we teach this to our kids?

As a father, I plan on making sure my kids will know how rich and flavorful the US history is...

I think it will start with Jambalaya and Gumbo. Somethings have to start somewhere.

:evilgrin:

ETA: Or Beiber, he's Canadian so he might know some US history..

So why not the Jonas Brothers?

Monster is a history lesson.

and if they understood the present well enough, they would do something about it.

I graduated high school in 1994 and at the time had never taken a history class that went beyond 1945 or dealt with any aspect of American History beyond the founding fathers and the wars.

If I say something, and you have evidence to the contrary - SHARE IT WITH EVERYONE!!!

I make mistakes. So does everyone else.

It is my position that "A People's History of the United States" should be taught, alongside the official textbook.

Without it, the Story of the US is all about Europeans that made this place bland yet if you don't like the flavor, you get crucified.

I requested an assignment on the Vietnam War in my junior year because it had been almost completely ignored, and was something my father was still suffering the effects of.

and our classes went beyond 1945. They took us up to modern-day history (early 90's).

wickerwoman

What?.. No history classes who went Beyound 1945???.. Dam your school must sucks... And if that is evidence of the state of the US education, then it answer a lot of your current troubles.. If you dosen't know the past, you wil also never be able to survive the future I have learned...

But then, I was a sucker for history, from the day I managed to read a book.. And as I was grown up in a home with a lot of books, it was kind of natural to plew true all this books as fast as I posible be able to do.. I even managed to "read to death" some books, becouse of I read it so mutch...

On the other side, it might also be becouse Im living in Europe, where we maybe try to conserve our history, as we have a lot of it, and it is important to know history, even tho it is "booring" to learn at first.. Most are maybe not like me, who have allways been intersting in history, but at least we know parts and bits of history, both old and new...

Even tho Im not to good into US history, at least I can the most important points, specially after world war two... As US had a important role in the future of Europe.. I doubt Europe would have had the same chances right after world war two.. As it had, becouse of "great allied on the other side of the atlantic".. US was a great friend for most of Europe.. (at least the Western Part of Europe!)

Diclotican

Did you really make comparisons?

teaching our history. It's diverse, but we also have to be honest.

History is written by those in power.

It wasn't until late high school that I learned that most of what I was taught about Native Canadians (I live in Canada) was bullshit. We need to get the history of indigenous people, of racialized people, of women, of LGBTQ people, and of people with disabilities into our schools. Into our elementary and middle schools, not just in university courses taken only by those who are interested in the first place.

If all you want to do is to make a nation into a corporatocracy

Show everything, warts and all

Yes the very right have it very well - but so should EVERYONE

We have a duty to make this place right - whether we are crushed by the machine or not

Granted, everyone should stay as far as they can from machines - we have to right the wrongs, punish the wrongdoers, and make our world safe for everyone

But you don't fight it with guns, you fight it with words

Fight it with guns, and you end up with jailed jihadis

Fight it with words, and you have Mark Twain, Ernest Hemmingway, John Steinbeck, Stephen King (oh yes I did - he is a prolific writer who will go down in history if not for the sheer number of volumes as a transition for his generation - from theirs to the others) who all followed this way, and WON.

You have to celebrate the victories that are, rather than the failures that are not.

I am appalled at how little people know about the government and legislation. I was talking to our State Rep the other day, and he was bemoaning this point. He said he cannot count the number of times people contact him to do something about a bill that is in the federal House or Senate. Our schools are failing us all, but especially the younger people. How long has it been since the subject "civics" was even taught???

and there's only so much time allotted to teaching it in school

by the time they have worked their way through the civil war, it's time to hop-skip past WWI,then hop-skip through WWII and then it;s time to graduate..

but we all know about the cherry-tree chop.. the walk a mile to return a penny, and other assorted fairytales turned into history.

Unless you plan to write history or teach at a college level, there's no need to go further..

YOOESSAAAY!! We're #1..

That would defeat the purpose of brainwashing the masses.

It gives me hope when I see these. Maybe hope for another generation.

you keep running into comments about this story being important to the culture or that tale being important to the group as a people. Many American and African tribes realize that if you destroy the myths that historically united them you have gone a long ways to destroying tribe's unity.

Research in post-Soviet Russia pointed clearly to the centrality of a shared interpretation of history being important to a feeling of being "a people": One bit of research dealt with Tatars and Russians in a single town; another looked at Yakuts and Russians; a third, at Komi and Russians. Even bad things that one ethnicity did to another had to be dealt with sympathetically and without resentment. In other words Tatars had to not condemn the Russians for what happened during WWII; Russians had to not condemn the Tatars for what had happened centuries before. Same with the Komi and the Yakuts. Otherwise there was no view of being a people, and society fractured and splintered and interethnic tensions rose.

"History" is what you make it, to a large extent. It can be taught to exclude groups in a society; it can be taught to include all groups in a society; or it can be taught to splinter society so that groups resent each other. It's proper to point out that much of how American history was simple, nationalistic myths that excluded people (more on that in a moment). But what replaced it is often to not understand why hateful actions happened, but to castigate as though dignity were a zero-sum game. The goal sometimes doesn't seem to be to establish commonality; it often feels as though the goal is to establish mutually exclusive, competing senses of exclusivity. Such breakdown in myths and community in Russia bred skin-heads that engaged in Tatar-bashing, as well as Tatar gangs that bashed Russians.

In some cases, "excluding people" is an attitude of the perceiver and not really part of what's taught. I always found it humorous that Western culture is traced back largely to the Greeks and Romans, thereby "excluding" many ethnicities. I'm neither Greek nor Roman, nor especially European, nor do I feel feel any great cultural affinity for them beyond intellectual tradition. But that tradition is extensive enough to accept people regardless of ethnicity being, as it is, not an ethnic but an intellectual one. It's as grafted onto Anglo-Saxon traditions as it is onto Kikuyu or Malayalam traditions. This recalls the benighted bloviation I heard about why a Korean-American should study an "Asian" language instead of Russian, in which "Asian" wasn't a geographic but a racial term, in parallel with an American black who wanted to study a "black" language--Swahili or Zulu were "his" languages, even though it was highly unlikely that any of his ancestors could have been from E. Africa or from S. Africa. Culture, intellectual traditions, even languages have been racialized in the fractionation of society and humanity.

Their educational approach to history would be pathetic and ludicrous if it weren't so tragically propagandized.

Yet it was fought over slavery - in Mexico slavery was banned, like it was in much of the world at the time.

Texas wanted to be a slave state, and so it goes, so it goes...

Like How most of the the Founding fathers were smugglers, criminals, Tax evaders and atheists, that Grew hemp ---> also treasonous to the British crown.

On edit/ they drank gallons of alcohol and smoked Marijuana. (hemp)

(enough Apple cider and a Joint... YOU will want to form your own country too.;-):)

may as well start with the beginning of the raping of the Americas.

Blankets...

http://www.thomhartmann.com/articles/2004/10/columbus-day-celebration-think-again


"Columbus and his men also used the Taino as sex slaves: it was a common reward for Columbus' men for him to present them with local women to rape. As he began exporting Taino as slaves to other parts of the world, the sex-slave trade became an important part of the business, as Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500: "A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are now in demand."

it didn't leave much.

and that's where you start.

Getting over denial is the first step towards healing

Getting from the talk to the act is gonna be the hard part.

Forget what movie that was from.

All that rah-rah bullshit but not the truth, which is sometimes ugly.