How is the American War for Independance taught in the UK?

[Dense_Electric]

Typical American arrogance to assume it's taught at all.

Haha, wow, did you really register just to make that post? Oh, by the way, the village called. They want their troll back.

 

[Calbeck]

Wasn't a major part of anything really.

1) British subjects, as opposed to colonized locals, calling the Crown out on breaking English laws.

2) Major colonial investment lost, the most expensive (and indeed, most profitable) set of Crown colonies.

3) Major embarrassment when better-constructed American light frigates (built with whole oak boles) repeatedly defeated British men-of-war.

the 13 colonies were really really tiny by contrast to Canada, India and Africa

In land-mass claims, sure. Not in terms of developed land or profitable trade...only India came close to that.

 

[Febel]

Typical American arrogance to assume it's taught at all.

Oh you!

Finally, after seeing more than a dozen replies to that I'd been waiting for someone else to catch on.

 

[emeraldrafael]

Its usually summed up like this "America wanted independence, they got it".

Not really touched upon too much, which is a shame really :/ generally they try to focus on the important stuff though

Actually... As an American, i wonder if they talk about it more as AMERICA rebelling, or France just doing there thing and America making a small thorn in their side they really didnt need at that point.

I know we like ot think that we "beat" the UK, but without France occupyinh britian in the home land, we'd have been screwed.

I have a feeling we wouldn't have given up until either every lats one of us was dead or they gave up. If it was a strong enough cause for them to rebel against the then most powerful military in the world it was a strong enough cause to not give up for.


After all when you're fighting to defend the very land you're standing on you generally have nothing to gain by giving up.

um... I never said anything about giving up, just that without france occupying britain, britain could have had a lot more man power in the colonies and wiped hte army out with ease. We wrote a pretty big check to France, and America should conitnue to write a thank you card to them every year.

And hoenstly, we didnt have a real reason to rebel, since the mainland british citizens were having it so much worse off in forms of taxation and all that jazz we liekd to cry about.

 

[LarenzoAOG]

Typical American arrogance to assume it's taught at all.

Why not? We teach kids about Vietnam in America, even if we lost it was a big event in the history of our country. We also teach about the Trail of Tears and slavery and all the cunty things our country has done, even if we don't like the fact that it happened we still need to acknowledge it and teach the children about it. Is there any downside to teaching the American Revolution in the U.K.?

 

[LostAlone]

Wasn't a major part of anything really.

1) British subjects, as opposed to colonized locals, calling the Crown out on breaking English laws.

2) Major colonial investment lost, the most expensive (and indeed, most profitable) set of Crown colonies.

3) Major embarrassment when better-constructed American light frigates (built with whole oak boles) repeatedly defeated British men-of-war.

the 13 colonies were really really tiny by contrast to Canada, India and Africa

In land-mass claims, sure. Not in terms of developed land or profitable trade...only India came close to that.

India was a way bigger deal. Oh and Hong Kong. And those juicy diamond mines in Africa. There were reasons why we ruthlessly crushed their spirits for centuries.

Basically what I'm saying is that while America was nice enough, it was a LONG way from being as important as you think. Like I said, if we cared that much, we could have easily come back and made you say uncle.

 

[MrGalactus]

Nobody could claim any moral high ground, but the good guys won.

Typical American arrogance to assume it's taught at all.

Why not? We teach kids about Vietnam in America, even if we lost it was a big event in the history of our country. We also teach about the Trail of Tears and slavery and all the cunty things our country has done, even if we don't like the fact that it happened we still need to acknowledge it and teach the children about it. Is there any downside to teaching the American Revolution in the U.K.?

Because those things are important parts of history that shaped modern America. The American war for independence wasn't that big of a deal to modern Britain as far as British history is concerned.

 

[Dastardly]

I completely agree with that- slavery is glossed over with that "States Rights" bullshit. No-one wants to admit it was over race, they want to move on and hate homosexuals while the hatin's good (i.e.: until the bigots get it handed to them again).

I've got to disagree with you here.

Historically, the South was indeed fighting for states' rights. They felt as though the federal government was favoring the needs of the industrialized North, while the agricultural South was left to rot. So they opted to stop sending their money north and formed their own government... or at least that was the plan.

Were many of them bigots? Sure. And the North hated blacks just as much, and treated them as subhuman, too. The Emancipation Proclamation didn't free a single slave in the North*, you realize--right? Lincoln disagreed with slavery, but the North? They had slaves. Just not as many, because they didn't have as many farms. Of course, that didn't stop them from putting those god-awful Irish in shitty, unsafe factory conditions, or basically enslaving Chinese immigrants to build those industrially-driven railroads out West...

(nor did it do anything to mitigate the fact that the North got rich on the slave trade. How many slaves do you figure came into those Northern ports to be sold to Southern plantation owners?)

So both North and South were equally bigoted, right? Maybe, but it's still not the whole picture. Very few people in the South owned slaves. That was a rich man's game. Most people in the South didn't particularly care one way or the other about slavery, just like most people in the North didn't particularly care about freeing them.

Slavery was and is an awful thing that has occurred in nearly every culture in human history, and still occurs in many places today. No one "down here" in the South is out there trying to defend or reinstate slavery. (Of course, there is a lot of mutual racial resentment between blacks and whites down here, largely borne of a cultural feuding and economic ruin resulting from the North's handling of "Reconstruction" more than any sense of superiority)

Lincoln chose to make the war "about Slavery" to add a moral cause to the proceedings, but that's not why the South was fighting. It's US history's biggest strawman, and it has been used ever since to allow "the North" to stereotype "the South" while simultaneously pretending they were always as "enlightened" as they claim to be now.

I'm not saying the South should have won, or that slavery shouldn't have ended. In fact, I don't know of anyone out there actually saying either of those. I'm saying that the over-simplified version of the Civil War is blatant propaganda taught as historical fact, in an effort to villainize anyone who would ever again bring up the idea of seceding from a government that fails to adequately represent its interests (You know, like how "we" did in the Revolutionary War?)

*The first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation actually included a provision that any rebelling state that would give up revolt and return to the Union would have slavery reinstated and would have its runaway slaves returned to them.

 

[Lenny Magic]

It might just been my late entry into the Englandich education system, but they touched very little on anything relating to any countries fight for independence. and even then it was just a basic summery sort of like; "We used to have a an empire, we don't anymore... Now who wants to hear about the 1066 for the 100th time?!"

 

[Febel]

Wasn't a major part of anything really.

1) British subjects, as opposed to colonized locals, calling the Crown out on breaking English laws.

2) Major colonial investment lost, the most expensive (and indeed, most profitable) set of Crown colonies.

3) Major embarrassment when better-constructed American light frigates (built with whole oak boles) repeatedly defeated British men-of-war.

the 13 colonies were really really tiny by contrast to Canada, India and Africa

In land-mass claims, sure. Not in terms of developed land or profitable trade...only India came close to that.

India was a way bigger deal. Oh and Hong Kong. And those juicy diamond mines in Africa. There were reasons why we ruthlessly crushed their spirits for centuries.

Basically what I'm saying is that while America was nice enough, it was a LONG way from being as important as you think. Like I said, if we cared that much, we could have easily come back and made you say uncle.

we could have easily come back and made you say uncle.

say uncle.

why must you feed the flames of patriotic bickering. This is why we can't have nice things, you know.

 

[Grospoliner]

Typical American arrogance to assume it's taught at all.

Typical butt hurt American hate attitude. As if any historical event is less important than any other.

 

[-Samurai-]

I never understood the love-hate relationship between the UK and USA. We're friggin' allies! Sure, the US came to the parties late, but we still fought evil together! And I guarantee we'd do it again, if need be.

It's all in the accent. To an American a British accent naturally has undertones of authority and intelligence. And what do Americans hate more than Authority and Intelligence? So we are forever doomed to call each other posh pricks and pompous pillocks.

This entirely joking post was brought to you by the letter Zed!

Zed isn't a letter! And we like color and not colour! We realize things, not realise them! And so on and so forth.

I'll be watching you....and your authoritative, intelligent accent...

 

[teebeeohh]

OK regarding WW2 and the Holocaust in Germany:

It gets taught. A lot. Not just in class but also in the news and every once in a while when some idiot says something along the lines of "not everything the nazis did was bad, they [...]". And since we still have this kind of guilt complex there will be no discussion on the subject if you mention it you are just an evil nazi. This goes so far that until about 5 years ago it was widely considered to to be showing support for neo-nazis to have a German flag in front of your house.
The Problem with is that by the time you get to the lessons concerning this in your history classes everyone has some knowledge and the universal reaction is "this again". Also whenever somebody criticizes Israel or some celebrity who is Jewish the "Zentralrat der Juden"(which essentially does a lot of lobbying for Jewish interests) will remind us how we are all still nazis and no German will ever be far enough removed from the Holocaust to ever criticize a Jew. The problem is that people under the age of let's say 50 generally don't think that they should be held responsible in any way for what happened and don't agree with the amount of time this topic gets, especially when compared to the way other countries treat their fuck-ups (native Americans, anyone?).
What does help is that almost everyone (at least everyone i know, and it was mandatory in the GBR, those guys took their de-nazifiying serious) visits a KZ during their school time. That is a very intense experience, especially if you do this during a downpour and even if you did spend the time on the bus organizing the alcohol for the evening.

 

[Grospoliner]

Japan's textbooks have a large, gaping hole in the WWII area, most notably toward the end.

Nothing happend then! We where all on vacation! In Pearl Harbor! We where invited and punch was served!

http://roadtoeurope.ytmnd.com/

This and then some because of the stupid forum hunter.

 

[Spade Lead]

As to the Napoleonic Wars, I am reading Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and unless you have read it yourself, you cannot IMAGINE how backwards the culture is compared to ours. (Clarification before anyone gets pissy: I mean backwards as in contrary, not backwards as in wrong. Russian Culture and History has always fascinated me, it just gets really weird what was and wasn't acceptable back then) Then again, I haven't read much literature from that era, and the whole God Damned WORLD could have been like that, and I would never know the difference...

 

[LostAlone]

why must you feed the flames of patriotic bickering. This is why we can't have nice things, you know.

Awww but I'm having fun.

And tbh if I can teach an American humility, I will be in with a shot for a nobel prize.

 

[trooper6]

The American War of Independence was historically quite important, it being the first nationalist revolution and the beginning of the end of monarchic and feudal systems. However, most British folks I've known have not learned anything about it in school...as the comments here bear witness. Though, my British friends who studied history in University did learn about it.

However, I have always been interested in the different ways in which one can view history and I made it a point to learn other sides of stories, including the American Revolution. So, any American who'd like a different take on the American Revolution, I'd recommend _Redcoats and Rebels_ by British historian Christopher Hibbert. It is a very good book and it really deconstructs some of the propaganda that we are taught in our high school version of the Revolution. It adds a LOT to the story. Very eye opening.

http://www.amazon.com/REDCOATS-REBELS-Christopher-Hibbert/dp/1844156990/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1306731208&sr=1-1

As a side note, I also recommend, as another view of US History-- _A People's History of the United States_ by Howard Zinn.

 

[Dastardly]

The text book itself(for Texas) was VERY lacking for the national history portion. The sections for each area were extremely small and given we only had 250 years an 1 1/2 thick text book would seem good. Except it was plastered with pictures and the print was something out of a child's pop up book.

Will clean up my previous point to avoid further confusion.

But as far as i am concerned Texas text books for history suck and go into little depth on most subjects.

Well, that is because they spend a whole YEAR teaching the 12 years Texas was an independent country. Fuck that class, Texas History. It was long, boring, and stupid. No one in my class CARED that Texas was an independent country. Does Massachusetts have a "Massachusetts History" class dealing entirely with the history of being a separate colony until they signed the Articles of Confederation? Not that I know of... But Texas has to be fucking special, and not in a "You win a prize" way, either...

Actually, in most states, the standard course of study includes (usually around 7th grade) a course on that individual state's history. It's actually a pretty effective way of providing a "zoomed in" snapshot about how major events in US history impacted smaller areas and the people living in them. It provides more context for understanding those larger events.