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

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

So do they teach the American Revolution in the Uk as an English civil war with the English fighting the English or not?

Nah they were fighting colonists. Those filthy, filthy colonists...wait, I'm one of them.

That is the funny thing to me, I have heard people from the UK talk about the colonists as if they are like completely different from them, when they are actually all English and have the same history. LOL

 

[Febel]

So do they teach the American Revolution in the Uk as an English civil war with the English fighting the English or not?

Nah they were fighting colonists. Those filthy, filthy colonists...wait, I'm one of them.

That is the funny thing to me, I have heard people from the UK talk about the colonists as if they are like completely different from them, when they are actually all English and have the same history. LOL

Well not really. I mean, when we decide to break off and form our own country you kind of have to stop refering to yourself by the old name.

 

[EGtodd09]

In case you haven't noticed america, no-one else cares about your history. That being said, I hope all countries realise that no-one except themselves care about their country's history. Only once you get to very high level history do you begin to learn american civil war etc. and not many people like history enough to get to such a high level where I am.

 

[Sacman]

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."

Well I didn't get that in Elementary school... every year it was the same rehashed story about Thanksgiving that wasn't true anyway... and that's all we honestly heard on the subject, I had to learn a lot more from the History channel and, being Native American myself, my family members... though I went to catholic school, a catholic school that didn't even touch upon evolution in 8th grade biology despite the fact that there was an entire chapter about it in the book, so a skewed curriculum might have had something to do with it there... but Highschool wasn't much better, I took history 3 years, World History, Geography which doubled as a history class, and US History... Geography actually taught me more about Native Americans than US History did we pretty much just went over the whole Christopher Columbus thing, the revolution, than it skipped ahead to the civil war, industrial Revolution, WWI/WWII and finished in the Cold War... I remember my teacher brought War Hammer 40K figures so we can play out WWII battle scenarios... but we never learned anything significant about Native Americans all I remember is that they were briefly mentioned during the French and Indian war...

 

[Loiterer]

That is the funny thing to me, I have heard people from the UK talk about the colonists as if they are like completely different from them, when they are actually all English and have the same history. LOL

As far as America is concerned, they stopped being English once they declared independence. How do you think the average American would react if I told them that I thought George Washington was one of my favourite Britons?

 

[snowpuppy]

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

It's taught here in Australia if you chose the modern history elective in high school.

 

[cheese_wizington]

Doesn't really matter. It's kind of sad though, lots of people died in that war just for it to be a footnote. Really though America wasn't all that important until the 20th century.

 

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

That is the funny thing to me, I have heard people from the UK talk about the colonists as if they are like completely different from them, when they are actually all English and have the same history. LOL

As far as America is concerned, they stopped being English once they declared independence. How do you think the average American would react if I told them that I thought George Washington was one of my favourite Britons?

Actually, I don't think they would think much about it. I think you are likely to get more of a reaction out of the British for that. Just walk into an English pub and say that and see what happens.

 

[Country_Bumpkin]

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).

Whenever I see people arguing that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, or that most people in the South didn't care about slavery, I always tell them to read the secession proclamations of the various Confederate states. They are almost as straightforward as you can be in their stated determination to sustain a slave society. They say that they want to defend slavery, to expand slavery, that the North is oppressing them for making it more difficult to own slaves, and that the enslavement of blacks for farming is the way God meant things to be, preferable to the industrialized North.

 

[LostAlone]

As far as America is concerned, they stopped being English once they declared independence. How do you think the average American would react if I told them that I thought George Washington was one of my favourite Britons?

Actually, they were American from the second generation of colonists.

In general terms, particularly where Empires and supra-national organisations are concerned, your nationality is based on where you are born, and you get called that regardless of what flag you salute.

Its the same reason that we still had Scots and Welsh despite them being under our heel for literally centuries.

Since Washington was born in America, he was definitively American by modern standards, although I imagine he would have called himself Virginian.

 

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

So do they teach the American Revolution in the Uk as an English civil war with the English fighting the English or not?

Nah they were fighting colonists. Those filthy, filthy colonists...wait, I'm one of them.

That is the funny thing to me, I have heard people from the UK talk about the colonists as if they are like completely different from them, when they are actually all English and have the same history. LOL

Well not really. I mean, when we decide to break off and form our own country you kind of have to stop refering to yourself by the old name.

I don't know, maybe because I am Native American I still view them as English invaders. LOL

 

[Spade Lead]

The irony was intentional, man. I didn't realize that cotton-picking was used to insult the southerners in general; I thought it was just used to refer to blacks. I used it 'cos I've always thought it was funny when people would say cotton-picking in lieu of "motherfucking" as though it's somehow less offensive.

I knew the IRONY was intentional, but I wasn't sure if you got it at the level I did...

"Cotton-picking" is a bigoted insult, meaning that you are down in the cotton fields with the "Niggers" and don't deserve to be known in polite society (because picking cotton was slave work, not dignified enough for "real people" to do). The blatant jingoism flying around this thread, then the term "Cotton-Pickin'" coming up was just too much. I actually busted out laughing when I read that, and I wondered if you truly appreciated the beauty of your humor, or were just using a phrase you had heard before. I am glad I could educate you...

 

[fooddood3]

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

Formation of a global superpower sounds like a significant event in history regardless of where you live

To be fair, I personally didn't hear a lot about how Russia was formed, even though it was arguably the only other superpower in the last hundred years. I guess it's kinda different it wasn't like Wyoming broke off.

 

[Loiterer]

Actually, I don't think they would think much about it. I think you are likely to get more of a reaction out of the British for that. Just walk into an English pub and say that and see what happens.

Really? Not even in, say, a Tea Party rally? Over here I'd probably just get a strange look and asked "George who?".

 

[Hatchet90]

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

Okay, I am American yes. But this is actually quite arrogant itself. Would it be a major subject? I would assume not like Vietnam isn't mentioned that much in American. Plain and simple, losses aren't elaborated on.

However, the sudden loss of a giant portion (Well over four times the size of their current country) of a country's land seems to be quite a major piece of history that needs be covered.

I have also wondered quite a lot by this and I'd love to know the answer. I'm glad to see someone else has asked and actually been OPEN MINDED enough, rather than arrogant, to want to know.

I don't know about your school, but we took three weeks to cover the Vietnam War, then again that was an AP course...

 

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

Actually, I don't think they would think much about it. I think you are likely to get more of a reaction out of the British for that. Just walk into an English pub and say that and see what happens.

Really? Not even in, say, a Tea Party rally? Over here I'd probably just get a strange look and asked "George who?".

Why would it matter in a Tea Party Rally? And I guess you guys do have a lot of Georges. LOL

 

[LostAlone]

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

Formation of a global superpower sounds like a significant event in history regardless of where you live

To be fair, I personally didn't hear a lot about how Russia was formed, even though it was arguably the only other superpower in the last hundred years. I guess it's kinda different it wasn't like Wyoming broke off.

Its more like Puerto Rico breaking off ;-)

 

[trooper6]

Hehe its always fun. And yeah, as with any internting, everyone's always at least partially wrong.

Whats really interesting to me is seeing the difference in educational approaches. Like I said earlier, I am a major fan of the US, but I do wonder a lot about how you educate your kids. It often seems that outside of the world wars, it seems to be very introspective, which is very alien to Europeans.

I'm a bit older than most, so I got my US high school education a while ago...before some diversification happened. But basically, in high school in California, we had to take: (note High School is 4 years long)

4 years of English (i.e. literature). One year...was dedicated to American Lit and one year to British Lit...but in the other two years, we still got lots and lots of British Lit. Everybody read Dickens and Shakespeare. We read no women except Emily Dickenson, and no people of color. This, I understand, has changed since I graduated.
3 years of Math
2 years of Science
3 Years of History (1 year of US History, 1 year of World History--which is mostly the history of Western Europe with an emphasis on Great Britain, 1 year of Economics and Government)
3 Years of Physical Education
2 Years of a Foreign Language

These were minimums and people often took more math, science, and language for college.

And then some miscellaneous things like:
1 Semester of a Fine Art (Drama, Music, Photography, etc)
1 Semester of an Industrial Art (like Typing, Computers, Auto Shop, Wood Shop, etc)
1 Semester of a Domestic Art (like Cooking or Sewing)
Often there would be a semester of Health and maybe a semester of Driver's Ed.

As a side note, my Middle School (aka Junior High) was three years long and we did one year of US History and one year of World History, and our literature classes involved a lot of British lit as well...it was in Junior High that we read some of the Cantebury Tales and Beowulf.

Anyway, my education involved a LOT of Europe...a little India/Japan/China and almost nothing in Africa. And we generally favored British History, we learned lots of Kings and War of the Roses, and all of that. -- Though we basically did a lot of UK, Spain, France, Germany...with Italy being represented in ancient times and in the Renaissance.

I think our History was not in depth enough, and we didn't learn anything about the Ottoman Empire. I would have liked a much more diverse World History, but there you go--we really like Britain.

 

[Loiterer]

Why would it matter in a Tea Party Rally?

Well they named themselves after a prolific act of colonial era American defiance for a start...

 

[funguy2121]

The irony was intentional, man. I didn't realize that cotton-picking was used to insult the southerners in general; I thought it was just used to refer to blacks. I used it 'cos I've always thought it was funny when people would say cotton-picking in lieu of "motherfucking" as though it's somehow less offensive.

I knew the IRONY was intentional, but I wasn't sure if you got it at the level I did...

"Cotton-picking" is a bigoted insult, meaning that you are down in the cotton fields with the "Niggers" and don't deserve to be known in polite society (because picking cotton was slave work, not dignified enough for "real people" to do). The blatant jingoism flying around this thread, then the term "Cotton-Pickin'" coming up was just too much. I actually busted out laughing when I read that, and I wondered if you truly appreciated the beauty of your humor, or were just using a phrase you had heard before. I am glad I could educate you...

Thanks Dad!