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

[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.

I'm not entirely sure it was all taxation related. Some of it was theological, I'm sure. Freedom of religion is one thing that was big on the Founding Father's minds, so much so that it's in the damn constitution, yet under the Crown at the time such things weren't allowed. Then some of it was how the Crown thought we would take kindly to allowing soldiers we didn't even want here to bunk in our homes. Taxation may be the popularly taught reason less for the actual taxation, which did contribute to our general dissatisfaction, but because we aren't too terribly fond of the taxes we currently pay.

To be fair, we did bring those acts like the quartering acts on ourselves. Plus townshend was a fucking idiot when it came to running stuff and didnt like the colonies to begin with. and any tax the colonies had to pay or were dissatisfied with, the mainland british had it much worse.

And as for religious freedom, well, you had that in PA. hell, thats why britain shipped any religion they didnt like over here.

... and I think the fundamentalist mormons would like to talk to you, since some of the founding fathers went out of their way to make their lives miserble and nip that particular plant int he bud.

I'm not saying we shouldnt have rebelled, just, way over inflate their "tragedies" that led to rebellion. Most were really rather fair when you compared it to what the British were doing, what their mainland citizens had to pay, and that they pretty much saved our asses from being French, or letting the natives roll back through the colonies to take their lands back/

 

[Mordereth]

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.

*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.

Well yes, the North was equally racist: both sides were pawns of politicians, as with life since the nativity of any sort of human group, especially governments.

@Emancipation: Sure, sure- Lincoln announced a plan to halt slavery's expansion, then slowly stop it. This way the South's agricultural economy would get less bum raped. It was his campaign platform (which means that people in the US, on a whole, voted for it), hence the secessions starting after he took office. It also would have been far preferable than Sherman's Assrape Spree to the Sea towards the South's economy.


I live in Tennessee, and have for almost a decade now, and would just like to say there's nothing of history in any of the plethora of instances of racism I've seen- it's the same "not one of us"-based thinking that perpetuates racism is all cultures, the Civil War doesn't matter.

Of course, you go to the ghettos of Nashville and see 99% poor Black people there porch sitting, but that's got lots to do with segregation (which also occurred in the North, but they had more to start off going into it and thus faired slightly better).

 

[Calbeck]

Read up on the East India Company. They were richer than the British government. And had their own army.

And wasn't the only British company like that. Or even the bigger, wealthier, and more powerful of the two circa 1776. -

India was a VAST trove of wealth and absolutely was the basis of the empire.

A basis, certainly. But sitting there and sour-graping the loss of the American colonies (sans Canada, which Brits themselves largely seem to discount as a significant source of wealth in that era) is rather lol-worthy.

And seriously, the British empires army was VAST. Our naval power was unsurpassed.

Gee, sounds like a familiar story. Except of course *we* haven't had any notable naval upsets inflicted upon us by a colony...or, say, Argentina. -:3

Like I said, don't think that just because you are a super power now, you were anything close to that at the time.

I'm sorry, but your straw man arrived here with insufficient postage and has thus been returned. -

You had George frikkin Washington for gods sake. What hope did we have ?

Oh, we also had the French. They kind of kicked your navy's ass, cut off the major portion of your army, and then we pounded them to crap until they surrendered.

And even THEN you Brits were too bitter about it to surrender the right way. -

 

[Vault boy Eddie]

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

One post, this asshole is clearly trolling. Why wouldn't it be taught? It's history that involves both countries and helped shape their future. Enjoy your suspension asshole.

 

[Shock and Awe]

I'd always wondered this exact thing, and the answer seems to be "it just isn't taught."

I'd say that seems absurd given that every American schoolchild learns the same story again and again every single year from about 3rd through 8th grade, but then again, I didn't know who Horatio Nelson was until I went to London last summer and asked, "who's the dude on the top of the giant friggin' obelisk?"

Thats because you don't get taught anything about the MUCH more important (at least in terms of the era) Napoleonic Wars. The Napoleonic wars were the WW2 of its time, and while the allies (us, russia, sometimes prussia, sometimes holland, portugal) had rather shittier motives (retaining monarchy and generally stomping on poor people) than the WW2 allies, the world would be VASTLY different had Napoleon extended his empire across continental Europe.

America was on Frances side btw. Bet you don't get taught that either.

No, we actually have a year dedicated to World History and the Napoleonic were covered quite thoroughly. Im sorry but you are making incredibly false claims that have no backing.

 

[funguy2121]

...or that we invaded japan back when we still used wooden boats...

Yeah, seems I missed that lesson as well. Did a bing search and the only invasion/planned invasion of Japan that I could come up with was during WW2. When did we invade Japan?

 

[trooper6]

How is the English Civil War covered in the USA?
Despite what americans like to think, very few in the UK actually care about it. They care more about the French.

That isn't a good comparison.

The OP didn't ask how the American Civil War was covered in the UK, the OP asked how a war that England was involved in was covered.
I wouldn't expect British folks to learn anything about the American Civil War, but I would expect them to learn something about something that is part of their own history and that had larger historical importance for the West. But I got over that.

But to answer you question, though I suspect that it was said sarcastically, we cover the English Civil war in detail--and while it has been a LONG time since high school, I think we were taught it in a vaguely royalist way. As a matter of fact, we cover quite a lot of British History. Because the truth of the matter is, Americans in general like Great Britain and feel very close kinship to it.

I was a sort of typical Anglophile growing up, loving all sorts of British things, watching British imports on PBS TV and so on. Thinking Britain was so great in everything...practicing my British Accent (received pronunciation and cockney), and all that. It was always my dream to go to England...and I remember when I first got there, all I got were British people going on and on about how terrible America was. Just lots of America bashing. So I went back to Germany where they were much more even keeled about the whole thing.

 

[supermariner]

Short answer - it isn't

Sure it's a big deal for you Americans
but there's three fundamental reasons it's not covered very much

1. We've had MANY instances of losing colonies either in wars or due to political pressure, not just the Americas
2. We lost, so we don't tend to like talking about it
3. British history is so amazingly diverse and interesting our time in America never really registers as important as say the viking/roman/norman/french and spanish invasions

 

[Fiend13]

They are taught about all the horrible and also good things the Nazi government did.

Except they did nothing good (the full employment story is a myth; also every single bit of infrastructure they built got destroyed in the war).

Having had that education myself i can confirm that WWII is actually the biggest part of our history classes and rightfully so. It even extends to a visit to a concentration camp (really shocking but a necessary process i have to say in retrospect; you really can't grasp the horror until you've seen it with your own eyes; the video material was made by the GI's who freed the camps).
The teachings about American history are of different density in Germany. Native population, colony, War of Independence and Civil War are only touched while World War I and II and everything after that is talked about in great depth.
I will probably regret this but i can boost your American Ego by saying that the german persepective on the rhole of the USA in both wars as well as the global politics of the 1950's is a very positiv and thankful one (the same view applys to some extend to Britain; the only thing we don't agree on in that 50 years are Hiroshima and Nagasaki). As for the more recent history starting with the vietnam war - let's just say not so much.

 

[Calbeck]

I must have learned about Coronado SIX TIMES.

One would think you would have been able to 'test' out of those classes and take something else... or have a break period.

Nope. Each state had minimal requirements, and none had subject-specialized testing classes. You took general placement tests when you arrived in a new district, but these rarely covered more than the basics. In particular, California and Arizona used different standards, so most of my California credits were considered worthless.

History, ironically, seemed to be one of those things no one trusted anyone else to teach correctly, so it was rarely tested for at all. Instead it was just re-taught, over and over.

Insofar as European history, I actually learned a lot more than most folks in this thread seem to have gotten. World War One, for example, went deep into the original causes, paying particular attention to the Byzantine "secret pacts" between nations which effectively made widespread war inevitable once bullets started flying. The bloody cost was also hammered home, with pictures of body-strewn battlefields and examinations of million-man death counts.

In fact, there was even a little bit of guilt associated with the idea that we ourselves "only" lost about 106,000 dead. Similar treatments were given to our own Civil War and the Second World War (though there, we did indeed only pick up with Pearl Harbor and go from there).

 

[Sonic Doctor]

Shit anything relating to Native Americans was left out that didn't have to do with Thanksgiving in my history classes...

Native Americans were dealt with quite a bit in my schools.

Plus in elementary, where Thanksgiving and Native Americans was a saturated subject, we actually got to break from that in my 6th grade class.

We had quite a large wooded area back behind our elementary school, and in that 6th grade class we were broken up into "tribes". Next, each tribe had to vote which Native American nation they were of, and then for I believe around a hole week of classes were spent out in that woods trying to live as our selected tribes lived. We had to construct a shelter that was of the same design as our selected tribe, and make the tools they used.

Another thing that definitely wouldn't happen in schools today, they actually let us try and construct Native American weapons, of course bows, arrows, and tomahawks.

We actually staged small battles between tribes and occasional trading sessions.

It was a better learning experience than if we had just read the text book and that was that. Though these days such things would be considered a waste of time, or more likely too dangerous. "Oh we can't have the kids acting like Native Americans in the woods, they could get hurt."

 

[Calbeck]

excessive force

-XD

>complaining about "excessive force" in war
>har har har har

 

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

I find this whole conversation quite odd. Most people mock the Texas educational system, but I find all of this baffling. We were taught that The American Revolution was an English civil war between English fighting English and with the aid of the French, due to Benjamin Franklins efforts, they overcame their oppressors and became their own nation.

We were taught about the bloody Islamic crusades, the boody Catholic crusades, about the terrors of the diamond industry that still continue to this day, About the Spanish slaughter in the new world, The haitians fighting their french slave owners, the ALL black confederate regiments led by black officers and about the Black union regiments led by white officers. We learned everything from Gauls fighting rome to the mongols in China. We learned about how apartheid and monarchies came to be and How they passed laws in the US to ensure illegal wars like Vietnam never happened again.

In school they didn't leave out the good, bad or ugly. They taught it all to us. I am surprised in this day and age they still try to sugar coat things rather than just tell it how it is.

 

[LostAlone]

To be fair, we did bring those acts like the quartering acts on ourselves. Plus townshend was a fucking idiot when it came to running stuff and didnt like the colonies to begin with. and any tax the colonies had to pay or were dissatisfied with, the mainland british had it much worse.

And as for religious freedom, well, you had that in PA. hell, thats why britain shipped any religion they didnt like over here.

... and I think the fundamentalist mormons would like to talk to you, since some of the founding fathers went out of their way to make their lives miserble and nip that particular plant int he bud.

I'm not saying we shouldnt have rebelled, just, way over inflate their "tragedies" that led to rebellion. Most were really rather fair when you compared it to what the British were doing, what their mainland citizens had to pay, and that they pretty much saved our asses from being French, or letting the natives roll back through the colonies to take their lands back/

The taxation deal especially is one thing I hate hearing about.

Nowerdays we hear again and again 'No taxation without representation' when almost no-one in Britain (under half a million out of 14 million) had the right to vote. Certainly regular joes had the right to vote, as it was based on property of a certain value, but EVERYONE had to pay hard taxes.

Particularly the stuff about Tea Taxes and the Boston harbor... *facepalm*. It was more about the right of the people to drink illegally smuggled dutch tea than a real problem with tax.

 

[Febel]

...or that we invaded japan back when we still used wooden boats...

Yeah, seems I missed that lesson as well. Did a bing search and the only invasion/planned invasion of Japan that I could come up with was during WW2. When did we invade Japan?

*cough*commodoreperry*cough*

 

[Calbeck]

at this point your just as bad as the "Typical American arrogance to assume it's taught at all." guy.

Nice try.

what are you actually trying to achive ? we were asked a question and we've all gave basically the same answer.

If that's true, it's both simplistic and avoidance on your part. And worthy of the same mockery leveled at Americans by Euros when WE don't spend significant time in our schools learning about, say, the Canadian losses at Dieppe. Then again, I rather imagine Brits don't teach much about that, either, since that was Churchill's little brainchild.

British history covers 1000s of years, you might get a mention during a single class but that's about it.

Sounds like Ghandi might get a paragraph. -:3