Incredibly sad that so many people in the imperial core can only learn about history when their superhero entertainment slop barely mentioned it. Watchmen had a scene showing the Tulsa massacre and millions of white people were like, "Wait, that happened?" I guess we need Spider Man 9 to have a scene detailing the Iran-Contra scandal for most people to realize that Reagan wasn't a great guy.
It’s funny, these days I’d call myself a wannabe history guy. I like reading about history. But coming out of high school, for years and years, I wanted nothing to do with American history. To me the 250 year span of America was the most boring epoch possible. And part of that might be my personality, as I’ve always been interested in pre-modern societies, but part of that is how I was taught in school. Because we get such a sanitized version. Founding fathers? They were all great, there was no conflict there at all, let’s spend a week talking about all the good and just battles of the revolution. Civil War? It was fought over… slavery, let’s move on. Assassination of Lincoln? We’re going to spend an entire week just on that. Reconstruction? Nothing to see there. Now we’re going to spend two weeks talking about westward expansion and reading extremely dry letters written by pioneers. You want to know about the trends and forces that shaped these events? Ha, here’s a primer on how to pan for gold. Okay, let’s spend the rest of the class talking about how cool and good America was in the two world wars.
I had two good teachers. One history teacher spent an entire quarter on native genocide. And one government teacher who straight up told us that the gulf of Tonkin incident was a false flag.
I can’t remember if my high school offered a world history course. I didn’t even have to take one in college.
My favorite teacher in High School was the history teacher. Reflecting on some of the stuff he said in passing, he was probably quite right wing, but since we were in very lib Toronto he had to keep that shit to himself or risk angry phonecalls.
So instead, he really focused on critically examining history and which sources we read, and challenging established narratives. Specifically, to challange the established liberal concensus on Canadian and world history. I think in his mind this would naturally lead us to what he believed.
But in a roundabout way, what he was acutally teaching us was a materialist analysis of history, and a good portion of that class subsequently became Marxists.
I was the same but anything european in general from the last 1000 years
I've since graduated to anything younger than 10,000 years old being boring
And I've come around to very recent history being interesting but only in the sense of analyzing the social relations and analogizing them to stuff that happens today.