US History and actual History.
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I'm in Quebec though, so most of the history curriculum is about how badly the British screwed over the French Canadians and not much else. I make sure to throw in the fact that plenty of other people had it pretty bad too and that the Quebecois were right there alongside them screwing other people over.Jodokh said:
Plus the Viet Cong were southern Vietnamese communist insurgents, not northern Vietnamese soldiers. The north was more than able to keep the war going and acted largely independently from the Viet Cong anyway.Imperiused said:
Having read an interview with a Viet Cong sniper/infiltrator (a 4 foot woman who was 17 at the time) it becomes pretty clear that the Americans were barely able to secure the major cities, let alone take the fight to Northern Vietnam.
It gets pretty well glossed over in our history.... I remember the mention of Hồ Chí Minh showing up to talk to FDR and ask him for help, because he was a big admirer of how The US had set up their government, and FDR was too busy with WW2 to bother with him.... Just imagine had he taken the time to have a conversation, The whole war might have been averted, simply because the US could have been a part of the reconstruction effort (Post French Occupation)Colour-Scientist said:
Since Martin Luther King died in 1968 US history just kinda switches to talking about him and his civil disobedience during that period. There is the demonization of Nixon that comes about shortly thereafter (that is how Vietnam is really taught) Nixon did Watergate, hid the Pentagon Papers, and after that the war ended. That is basically the gist of what you get on Vietnam in US history class.
Ah kay, Ya Im a west coaster. Seem to have inferiority complex over here or something when comes to history, which could be a good thing. Didn't learn to much bout Quebec accept it wanted to be it's own nation and Oka always Oka oh wait FLQ aswell.Commissar Sae said:
In mine we studied the slave trade a fair bit, including the slave ring. Though, of course, we were also taught about the Royal Navy's role in 'persuading' other countries to give up the slave trade.Calcium said:
If you look at my second post here, I do address that we needed the yanks to retake SE Asia, (although if the Indon nationalist movement hadn't been quislings, we would have had a lot easier time of it.) I'm not trying to take that away from them, well done those men and all that. My point is that I would like yanks to acknowledge other places as more than 'where the marines landed that one time'Saviordd1 said:
Scary part is the FLQ doesn't even officially appear in the Quebec curriculum. I always make sure to add it in but if I stuck with what the government wanted me to talk about the students would never hear about the October Crisis beyond the war measures act. Quebec has a fun tendency to whitewash its own history to make the Francophone majority look better and or as the victim of English oppression.Jodokh said:
To be fair there was a little English oppression in Quebec's history, but most of it was actually reinforced by the Catholic Church telling people not to try to move beyond their station and remain farmers. Sigh, I hate my government sometimes.
I don't remember reading much with a bias in my AP US history class, but that class itself taught me that everything, no matter how objective it tries to be, has some sort of bias. It was very blow by blow about events and taught a lot about the underlying issues of most of these issues. Often we would go over the ethics and rationale behind some of the morally questionable decisions and would try to present them in the manner that those who carried out the decisions saw them. I actually remember the Vietnam War being one of if not the longest section in my class, just by how fucked up the situation was politically and militarily.
I think I was lucky in my AP history courses because my teacher was just about to retire, and that section of the course was 1900-1980's, meaning that he had lived through part of the course. He tended to teach us more about the political, social, economic, etc. forces that led to an event and then how an event affected those same forces. As far as I know we never glossed over much of the ugly stuff America (yeah that's me... hi) did. On a side note, I've always thought it was funny how obsessed Woodrow Wilson was about starting the League of Nations, and then Congress said 'Fuck that shit'
The only negative I can think of is how I was taught about South/Latin America. The AP test didn't focus on it, so we only learned the bare minimum about it. But hey, we did get to hear all about Woodstock first-hand, so you know, I'll take it.
The only negative I can think of is how I was taught about South/Latin America. The AP test didn't focus on it, so we only learned the bare minimum about it. But hey, we did get to hear all about Woodstock first-hand, so you know, I'll take it.
The US had effectively ceased operation in the early 70s. The South didn't fall until 1975 after Democrats repeatedly (and in my opinion, correctly) refused to support further actions. They did, however, win the battle of public perception. The Tet Offensive ended, as I said, in a resounding defeat for the North. But video of it went on the nightly news and people went from kinda maybe supporting the war to actively protesting it.Imperiused said:
So you go from stating that "the US won the Vietnam War" to essentially backpedaling by saying "the US lost the Vietnam War because the public didn't support it"? Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're writing here.Sean951 said:
Regardless, the Tet Offensive did not soundly defeat the Viet Cong. It was a massive win for the southern forces, but it only had a very temporary effect on the rest of the war.
Thanks for the encouragement, but I'm sure at some point in the future I'll slip up and expose myself as the idiot that I truly am.flarty said:
Our involvement in Operation Condor is super-downplayed, especially in lower level history course, so much so that many I've spoken to know nothing about it. One would assume that American involvement in a pretty hostile, totalitarian takeover of a large majority of South America for the sake of forming non-communist alliances with states that could have been used as game pieces in an indirect war in the Soviet Union would be a semi-relevant topic, even if it was just for 1 day worth of class time.
As someone who teaches the intro college history classes, I would like to just toss my two cents in. The problems with teaching history comes down to three main issues:
1. Every nation/culture likes its history to portray itself in a positive light. History is written by a people to tell the next generation about itself. There will ALWAYS be a bias there.
2. While few historians like to admit it to the general public we never have all the information. Primary sources are biased or incomplete. People hide things that might make them look bad (or be used as evidence against them). Damage or loss destroy such materials far too often. And so much is just never left behind or written down for others to see. Historians NEVER have a complete picture and are always trying to fill in the gaps which introduces our own biases and expectations into the mix. And even then, we fight amongst ourselves constantly as to what was REALLY going on at that particular moment in time!
3. Time. As much as I hate to say it, time is our greatest enemy and our largest weakness when it comes to teaching the material. I teach condensed evening classes. Sixteen class session over eight weeks to cover U.S. history from colonial times to 1877. That means I literally have 2 hours to cover the Civil War in my general info class. Two hours to cover a war that spanned four years of fighting, political intrigue, and scarred the nation enough that we are still dealing with those wounds 148 years later.
We try to cover what we think is important. But there's the rub, isn't it? What one person considers important, another thinks little of. Our best bet as instructors is to cover what we can, pose questions to get the students to think, and provide avenues that the students can use to find out more. Beyond that, our mystical ninja powers simply do not extend.
1. Every nation/culture likes its history to portray itself in a positive light. History is written by a people to tell the next generation about itself. There will ALWAYS be a bias there.
2. While few historians like to admit it to the general public we never have all the information. Primary sources are biased or incomplete. People hide things that might make them look bad (or be used as evidence against them). Damage or loss destroy such materials far too often. And so much is just never left behind or written down for others to see. Historians NEVER have a complete picture and are always trying to fill in the gaps which introduces our own biases and expectations into the mix. And even then, we fight amongst ourselves constantly as to what was REALLY going on at that particular moment in time!
3. Time. As much as I hate to say it, time is our greatest enemy and our largest weakness when it comes to teaching the material. I teach condensed evening classes. Sixteen class session over eight weeks to cover U.S. history from colonial times to 1877. That means I literally have 2 hours to cover the Civil War in my general info class. Two hours to cover a war that spanned four years of fighting, political intrigue, and scarred the nation enough that we are still dealing with those wounds 148 years later.
We try to cover what we think is important. But there's the rub, isn't it? What one person considers important, another thinks little of. Our best bet as instructors is to cover what we can, pose questions to get the students to think, and provide avenues that the students can use to find out more. Beyond that, our mystical ninja powers simply do not extend.
Firstly, the "White Slave Trade" was controlled by Arabs, Turks, Ottomans, Berbers, and other north Africans. Second, it's quite inaccurate to call it "White slavery" since white people didn't exist until there was a reason to establish a racial caste system in the post-Colombian world. There were English people, French people Spaniards, Slavs, etc., but not White people because: "'White' depends for its stability on its negation, 'black.' Neither exists without the other. . . " - Frantz Fanon.flarty said:
Third, White Slavery isn't terribly relevant to American History, because it isn't American History. There were no White Codes, there was no Billy and Becky Dove Laws, there were no eugenics societies plotting to eliminate American Whites in the late 19th and early 20th century, there was never an Apartheid State established in any corner of the US built specifically to terrorize and disenfranchise White Americans. There is no legacy of White slavery in America.