US History and actual History.

[Erttheking]

I dunno, to they teach you guys about Japanese American Internment?

Not like we're clean of blood either, Canada did the same thing.

They don't teach much about WW2, but they do teach that. But really, I'm not really sure why people bring that up so often...it's among the least of our sins. Us Americans, that is. I'm not really sure how much evil Canadians have done.

Probably because you guys put George Takei in an internment camp.

.....We did what? Oh yeah, I remember hearing about that, he was born in one...just a second.

<youtube=JRxSzYFp8Iw>

 

[Random Argument Man]

As for other possible examples? Speaking of being from Canada, I remember hearing talks that the war of 1812 was considered on being edited in textbooks (if it hadn't already though, reports seem to be varied) to make it seem like the US had the war in the bag (that is, rather than it being that the US declared war and were unable to actual gain territory or change boundaries, that the US had a more righteous reason or result or something like that, again, it seems to vary to what extent) Although again, to what extent this is true doesn't seem to be consistent, and I'm not entirely sure if this is an active undertaking to alter history or if it's just the perception taken from conversations/over-hearing from select Americans.

It's a recent political thing with Harper. There's been funding in the culture department to glorify 1812. It's pointless now. It's mostly been something similar to saying "I've beaten that guy, who call himself a hotshot, in the past" while you're ignoring the fact that he's been hitting the gym since then...

OT: You guys should read some Howard Zinn. His books tell the stories that were edited out of text books.

 

[ninjaRiv]

And it IS still celebrated. Not in the jumping for joy, drink champagne way but in the "that'll teach those Japs not to cross us" way.

That just sounds like racism to me from some old 90 y/o man.

As for the celebration, I always thought of it as this: They are celebrating the end of the war. Not the death's of thousands, but the hopeful start of some amount of peace.

Also, people celebrated Bin Laden's death? Around here the most celebration you would get is, "Thank god we don't have to worry about him anymore, now the government can focus on the important things."

Well, I think maybe you live somewhere that's a little nicer than some places.

I see your point about celebrating the end of a war, rather than the lives it took, though. But it still doesn't sit right with me.

A lot of people celebrated his death. People took days off to celebrate, and they ran out into the street cheering. Obviously this wasn't everywhere but it happened.

 

[ninjaRiv]

One thing I find fascinating is the American Revolution is not really taught in Britain. One of my British friends can lecture me extensively on the lineage of the royal families of Europe, but he cant recall ever learning about the revolution other than it being a thing that happened.

Yeah, it's not taught here much. I don't know if it's because it's not our best moment in history or because it's irrelevant to us. But we do learn about it, mostly because we're soaked in American culture over here. Most of us know more about American politics than some Americans know about Europe over all, for example.

 

[Shock and Awe]

In my view the teaching of history in the US is an utter joke regardless if its a pro or anti US stance. Students these days are taught barely the basics and never really get an understanding of much of anything important. Even in the AP US class I was in I found it quite wanting. God forbid I get into what the regular class was missing.

 

[LordLundar]

I apologize for any misspellings and so forth, its quite late and I don't spell check my posts especially when they are titanically large(as is my way.)

One example I heard in another thread was that even before we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, apparently Japan was already gearing up to sign a surrender and then after we dropped the bombs they were almost ready to fully retaliate.

If this is off of my post in the "Nuclear strikes and why I have a hard time being friends with some people." Thread, then I wasn't saying they were ready to retaliate. Their leaders were still continuing the war because that's what leaders do in wars. They try to motivate their people as much as possible(hence the we will fight you to the last man rhetoric Japan was putting out.) So it wasn't necessarily that it made them want to retaliate as much as it was they just doing exactly what they were doing before and after. Both with respect to fighting the war and with respect to Japan pushing for peace.

That was me that said that and it was largely counter information to "the nukes won the war for the US!" claim. As said earlier in the thread it wasn't the nukes that directly caused the surrender, it was the realization that by the time Japan could have the resources to push back against the US in vengeance the country would have been lost to the Soviet and Chinese forces.

I've talked to a number of Americans (I'm Canadian by the way) and WW2 history tends to be an interesting subject. In America it's very little taught and it centers mostly around "Europe was almost gone until America stepped in and saved the world". The European front tends to be "America led the charge against the Nazis who were surrendering on sight and solely beat Hitler's forces" when the reality is with a couple of exceptions (Patton primarily) most American forces were holding taken positions so Allied forces could push forward. The Japanese front largely consists of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, then the US nuked Japan and Japan immediately surrendered.

Now don't get me wrong, The US did serve a pivotal role in turning the war but American history of it tends to be short on details and long on "US did everything" when their involvement was more about reinforcements than blaze of glory.

 

[PissOffRoth]

Every government lies about things to make themselves seem better to their citizens. If they didn't, they wouldn't be in power for very long. War is ugly, so are politics and economics. If you don't want to live in a dung pile, you're going to do some terrible things to other people to elevate yourself above the rest. Every successful country in history is built on the blood, sweat, and tears of OTHER countries.

Our world is in a constant state of the strong pillaging the weak.

 

[Epic Fail 1977]

Near 4000 tons of bombs dropped and well over 20.000 people killed in two days, about 40 square kilometers of the city basically leveled to the ground. Naturally, here, too, a lot of post-hoc rationalization came into play, and granted, it wasn't a "US bombing", since it was done by the British and the Americans both.

I'm not aware of any post-hoc rationalisations of Dresden. IIRC Arthur "Bomber" Harris was extremely forthright in his opinion that (paraphrasing) the Germans, after terror bombing London, deserved everything they got and more.

 

[Vladimir Stamenov]

A little offtopic here, but I am interested, do US students study the ancient history of the world and then the middle ages, Renaisance and so on? My own country's history program is extremely biased, having 5 years on Bulgarian history from the Thracians to the modern day. It's unbelievable.

 

[mfeff]

At university when it came around for the history credit(s), at first I opted to take an American History course. No sooner than the boxer rebellion was touched upon, I was dropping the course. Consequently Surveys of World Civilizations I found to be much more objective. National history books will (always?) tend to be more ethnocentric than works that are produced as collaborations.

It's interesting to study "how" any particular culture may perceive an event, as a study of that culture. The caveat being that as a young student, some of those courses may cross boundaries that could be more trouble than they are worth in the pursuit of a degree (not history or anthropology related).

 

[The Funslinger]

But really the only real loser in the war was the Native Americans who got fucked over by the end.

A point that everyone conveniently sweeps under the carpet. They were the real losers going back to the Nine Years' War, ultimately. In 1763, the wealthier colonialists got pissed off with the British Government because they gave guarantees to the Native American allies that their land wouldn't be expanded into. Granted, it was minor, but it was one of the most spurious reasons for underlying resentment among a certain subset of landowners that contributed to the WoI. As I say, minor, though...

Yeah, I pretty much learned in my history classes that the conflicts between the Native Americans and the settlers was basically a loop of "more firepower and military cohesion beats the Natives back a bit, peace talks ensue, settlers throw treaties out the window at the earliest inconvenience, fight a bit more, and force Natives to sign a less fair treaty, wash rinse, repeat".

Not sure how similar that is to how they teach it in the US.

On a partially related note to all the US screwing around with WW2 facts, the Japanese outright erased it from their history books, because it's so shameful to them, apparently.

 

[Ryotknife]

A little offtopic here, but I am interested, do US students study the ancient history of the world and then the middle ages, Renaisance and so on? My own country's history program is extremely biased, having 5 years on Bulgarian history from the Thracians to the modern day. It's unbelievable.

Renaisance we kinda skimmed over. Middle ages we kinda skimmed over. Me personally, we probably spent more time on the Romans and Greeks than any other segment of history, including US history.

 

[flarty]

I am starting to wonder if this should have been in Religion and Politics... Damn hindsight... If possible and if needed to. It can be moved there, if so Mods allow.

I hope this can be kept civil but after reading another thread it got me thinking. How much of the US History (involvement with other nations), is just censored to make the US look better? Now as a US Citizen who did good in my US history class, I didn't feel it was bias.

What I meant was that it never seemed to shy away from all of the bad things we did and how we were straight up wrong in situations and so on.

One example I heard in another thread was that even before we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, apparently Japan was already gearing up to sign a surrender and then after we dropped the bombs they were almost ready to fully retaliate.

Which is much different than I learned. What I learned was that Japan wasn't willing to surrender and a land invasion would have been more costly and ended more lives than dropping the bombs. After the first bomb was dropped, apparently they didn't surrender and the second bomb is what happened.

Now I just don't know which is the truth, I would like to believe what I was taught, at least if I am remembering my class correctly (it was a bit ago...), is correct but I can't be sure.

So can anyone kind of give me some examples of events that are alerted in US history to make certain events in the history book look more pro-US than what happened?

Well you know that old rhetoric a lot of Americans use against Europeans, that if it wasn't for American involvement we would all be speaking German. Well as far as the rest of the world remembers it, it was actually Russia who marched on Berlin. It was also the Russians the Japanese was negotiating surrender with, looking for more favorable terms as they were about to enter the conflict in the pacific. Nearly half of all the deaths in WW2 can be attributed to the Russians in WW2 and they still had the biggest army than any other nation involved. The fact that they came so close to defeat them turned the tide and stampeded over everyone and thing in their way is nothing short of astonishing and its a dis-service when America try and takes credit for winning WW2.

I wouldn't trust nothing you learned in a national curriculum to be unbiased at all. Here in the UK they constantly leave out the whole slave trade out of our history lessons even though our nation was one of the biggest instigators of it, as well as leaving out many of the horrendous slaughters and injustices from British colonialism.

Of course your country isn't going to educate its own people where they have a horrendous foreign policy of divide and conquer. Be it through coups and enforcement of horrendous crippling economic policy in south America (read in to the CIA involvement of Allende Salvador by Pinochet and how they then continued to use the country as an experiment for the first free market to disastrous consequences). Or how they turned Afghanistan in to a hot bed of extremism and supplied them weapons and training to fight the Russians by proxy then to just leave it stew for 20 years. Or even more recently the whole Iraq thing, where yes billions was sent to the country after there "liberation" but for some reasons those billions were paid to private military contractors and oil companies, instead of repairing the country you just blew the fuck up in the name of peace.

This isn't an attack on you or any other US citizen. Its an address to the system you live in, and i live in too.
All in all don't believe the most accessible information, its usually the most accessible for a reason.

 

[davidsoc]

A little offtopic here, but I am interested, do US students study the ancient history of the world and then the middle ages, Renaisance and so on? My own country's history program is extremely biased, having 5 years on Bulgarian history from the Thracians to the modern day. It's unbelievable.

Depends. If you are referring to High School students (pre-university) it depends on the state....yes....it actually does. Dirty little secret of the US education system. There are federal standards to be met, as well as state standards to be met...and each state gets to determine exactly what those should be. Beyond that, well every country looks back through rose colored glasses.

I have a degree in History with an emphasis on the "far east" (Japan, China, south-east asia). I also have a california teaching credential (here we go again, each state also gets to determine what exactly is required to be a teacher....ugh). Quite frankly i had no desire to study US history for various reasons. The simplest one, there are basically 250 years of it, and to put it mildly it if often so over the top nationalistically that you aren't actually studying anything other than propaganda (admittedly this probably occurs in many places). Yes it often has to do with who is teaching it, but because of those dirty little standards you have little choice most times.

Simple example, the 2007 California standards for 10th grade "world history" has 12 total standards to cover. 8 of them involve world war 2 in Europe and Pearl Harbor. 2 involve the romans and greeks. So basically 90% of the california curriculum at that point involved those 4 subjects. BTW, this was "world history." My personal favorite: Aisa outside of WWII, all of Africa, all of South America, and anything outside of the World Wars and those 10 standards i referred to before this is 1 single standard. So go figure exactly how History is dealt with. Sadly, the standards have not changed much.

Captcha: That's hot.....sorry it is not hot, in fact it is total BS.

PS: i avoided some specific subjects to address how history is taught to allow you to draw your own conclusions. There is a serious lack of common sense and logic involved in teaching of most subjects in the US, with social sciences (mostly history and government prior to university level) being some of the worst offenders

 

[Da Orky Man]

Remember that Stalin was also against North/Western Europe during the Cold War as well, yet in history lessons in the UK, the role of the Soviets isn't downplayed at all. We learned about Stalingrad and Leningrad as well as D-Day and a bit about the war in the Pacific.

.

To be fair, Europe is a big place. Given that our written history dates back quite a few thousand years, there's a limit to what you can teach.

Not a big place. An old place.

Certainly not as old as civilization is in china, inda or the middle-east, but definitely when compared to any part of the americas.

You'd be surprised. The first 'advanced' cultures appeared in Europe (Minoan), Indian (Indus Valley) and China (Semi-legendary Xia dynasty) at roughly the same time, within a few hundred years, around 2500 BC or so. Even written Middle-Eastern civilization only goes back to about 3200 BC, though of course the first and, for quite a while largest, cities were situated along the banks of the Euphrates/Tigris.
If you date civilizations by the invention of writing, you get a bit more variety. The oldest written Chinese we have dates to about 1500 BC, Indian about 2600 BC and Minoan roughly 3000 BC.
For references, Ancient Egypt was united in about 3100 BC.

All figures were gotten from Wikipedia.

And to further sollidify your earlier point: In Germany kid are taught pretty obsessively how bad their nazi history was, whereas in Japan the kids hear very little if anything about the bad things Japan did.

I find that comparison interesting.

I've always presumed that the reason for that was the Japanese thing for honour. You know, not wanting to shame their nation by calling attention to the various acts committed during the war.

 

[davidsoc]

Leaving aside the nuclear can of worms (to which I will just say that there has been some serious post hoc rationalization going on about), one thing I would like to point out is Dresden. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II]

Near 4000 tons of bombs dropped and well over 20.000 people killed in two days, about 40 square kilometers of the city basically leveled to the ground. Naturally, here, too, a lot of post-hoc rationalization came into play, and granted, it wasn't a "US bombing", since it was done by the British and the Americans both. Also, not the only case of carpet bombing of a German city in WW2, but the most historically known one...

I dunno, do they teach you guys about Japanese American Internment?

Not like we're clean of blood either, Canada did the same thing.

Neither of these things were downplayed in my history classes in high school (about 10 years ago now) in the US. We had whole sections on these two things.

wrecking up Nicaragua and subsequent refusal of compensation/reparations by the States. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States]

This one is rather downplayed though!

Quite frankly Desert you were lucky. That particular subject has been added to the study topics (or standards) though they are still often glanced over for various reasons. The US history of messing with Latin and South America is horrible. One of my favorite issues with this is the US attitude towards those "other countries" that involve themselves with assassination and what not....when that particular tactic was huge for the US itself in those areas during the mid few decades of the 1900's.

lol, again: captacha: upper hand....you don't say, too bad (not really) the attempts were so badly managed that bumbling would barely qualify

 

[davidsoc]

And to further sollidify your earlier point: In Germany kid are taught pretty obsessively how bad their nazi history was, whereas in Japan the kids hear very little if anything about the bad things Japan did.

I find that comparison interesting.

I've always presumed that the reason for that was the Japanese thing for honour. You know, not wanting to shame their nation by calling attention to the various acts committed during the war.[/quote]

interesting take Da Orky. Could be correct, but i often think that the US occupation and the various changes and or requirements forced upon Japan during this period could be added to that as well. Afterall, the US was basically building an ally across the world in whatever image they wanted....

 

[afroebob]

So can anyone kind of give me some examples of events that are alerted in US history to make certain events in the history book look more pro-US than what happened?

Well, I think a lot of it depends on where you were taught. I'm sure a lot of schools don't even teach things like the Trail of Tears but I was learning about that all the way back in elementary school. I also learnt about the interment camps and we went into the REALLY bad parts about slavery in highschool. But I'm sure some schools don't even touch the Trial of Tears and interment camps with a 10 foot stick, and slavery they only do cause they have black kids in there school and I'm sure they don't go to far into the nastiest parts.