Ask Lemmy

Obviously we don't learn about unions at all. But the one that strikes me the most is the omission of the Battle of Blair Mountain, where the US government sent the army after the coal miners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

The Wilmington 1989 coup: After the Civil War, Wilmington North Carolina had a mostly black government. That didn't sit right with the whites, so they staged and successfully completed a Coup & overthrew the government. Only officially successful Coup to occur in the USA. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/when-white-supremacists-overthrew-government/

9/11 - The much lesser known 9/11 occurs in Chili in on 9/11/1973. During a US sponsored coup, the revolutionaries smash an airplane into the capitol building. My not-so-conspiracy theory is there's a reason the US event happened on 9/11 as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

In keeping with this month's news, if you don't know what the Japanese American Internment Camps are, or were rather, you might read up on them. I wasn't taught about them at all.

Another thing that's I think more niche but still ought to be taught is the history of censorship of anti-war protests. There were some terrible rulings about a hundred years ago that were later reversed, and that all made it possible for people to protest Vietnam the way they did.

Finally, one piece of history that's missing from many high school civics classes is any discussion of how unions themselves led to the minimal labor laws that we have today, that union members were killed in large numbers in the process of pushing for said laws.

Most of the people on the Mayflower were businessman. Very few were the legendary “Pilgrims” - who were less fleeing persecution and more the fact that they couldn’t persecute others anyway.

The entire narrative we teach in school is about the Pilgrims is bullshit.

Most US history educations are going to give you very sparse details about the brutality of the genocide of Native Americans. Smallpox blankets were real. Treaties were treated as suggestions rather than anything binding - we still don’t really honor them today.

A substantial cause of the Revolutionary War was that England wanted to reserve areas for Native Americans. Not even out of the goodness of their heart, but because it was fucking expensive to send and kit soldiers because colonists kept fucking with the tribes. All of those Intolerable Taxes and shit were kinda needed to fund the fact that colonists kept sticking their dick in a beehive and had to get epipen-ed by the Crown.

The Civil War was 100% about slavery. The “states rights” bullshit was fabricated in the decades after the war. There has been a full century of deliberate assaults on the real history of slavery and the Civil War in the United States. The unique character of its brutality (race based chattel slavery is not like what was practiced by other civilizations) is underplayed. (“B-b-b-but the first slave was an Irish guy owned by a Black man” or other bullshit - deliberately conflating things like indentured servitude with chattel slavery.)

The modern American police force is basically a direct descendent of slave patrols. The brutality against black men is also a long legacy - they made purses out of Nat Turner’s skin, and probably even ate parts of him.

Slavery didn’t really end. During reconstruction and afterwords, communities passed bullshit laws to re-enslave black people. It’s very easy to make an argument that the “war on drugs” in the US is a way of maintaining slavery, because the 14th amendment explicitly has a carve out that slavery is permitted if you are convicted of a crime.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was used to justify the Vietnam War, was a false flag. The idea that soldiers returning from war were spat on or harassed was something very deliberately propagandized. Not that it didn’t happen, but not to the extent it was portrayed.

I'm not from there but I'll say that The US doesn't intervene overseas in order "to spread democracy" or "to protect the world from the evils of communism" but to protect its economic interests, to increase the profits of capitalists through industries such as weapons and oil, and to make sure that no socialism occurs that threatens the stranglehold of capitalism.

Some books to check:

• Major General Smedley D. Butler - War Is A Racket
• Tim Weiner - Legacy Of Ashes: The History Of The CIA
• William Blum - Killing Hope: US Military And CIA Interventions Since World War II
• Noam Chomsky - What Uncle Sam Really Wants

The Tulsa Race Massacre.

Fred Hampton's story and assassination.

I did not find out about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study until adulthood. Its the biggest thing I can think of.

"black people are equal now"

Another book to mention - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me

I've only flipped through briefly, so I can't elaborate on the points. But I've heard reccomendations for it, and it seems exactly along the lines of this discussion.

Many already know Zinn, but posting it for some for whom this is new

https://archive.org/details/pdfy-otanUZGGGcnDgfr7/page/n1/mode/1up

Would be nice to learn about other countries too.

I grew up in Indonesia and would like to know how much of what we were taught regarding the Dutch and Japanese occupations were actually true. I believe we weren’t even taught about the fact that the Dutch attempted to retake control after Japan’s surrender after WW2. What I remember we were taught was just WW2 happened and we fought for independence.

I visited the Netherlands last year and talked to some locals who said their history lessons around that was quite different than what I learned (how long were we occupied, how bad the situation was, and the battles that followed WW2)

Can you rephrase the question? I'm not sure if you're referring to the sanitized version we are taught, or the other side of history that is withheld.

We have a classist system with heavy dash of racism and starting 40 years ago low class mobility