Wordslinger wrote:
The problem's roots are embedded in the American history taught by approved textbooks dedicated to showing only the noble, gracious, just and generous things our nation has done. The dark side doesn't appear unless you read something like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, or Simon Girty Turncoat Hero, etc.
I don't really accept that as being an excuse. My high school history class was taught by someone named "Mr Ezell" (I never heard his first name if he had one).
Mr. Ezell was a farmer from Brewton whose crops dried up. Somehow he got a teaching certificate and he was then my "history teacher".
I'll describe "history class" to you this way, and it wouldn't even benefit from any exaggeration because no exaggeration could do any justice to the truth of it.
Mr. Ezell came to history class in his farmer coveralls (no shit). He would then say "read chapter 4, class". That would be in what had to be the most boring excuse for a book ever published.
Virtually the entire class would then lay their heads down on their hands and go off to sleep until the bell rang. All the while, Mr. Ezell was literally reading seed catalogs up at his desk.
I honestly thought "history class" was the same thing as what they called "detention". And detention was where you sat doing nothing for an hour after school when you didn't obey the rules.
In other words, I thought "history" must be some form of punishment.
That stayed with me for the next few years. It was only when one day I visited the library for something (can't remember if it was the public library or the college library) that this all changed.
For the first time, I discovered the library had all the past newspapers and periodicals on microfilm.
I began to read about the atomic bombing in newspapers and periodicals that were published immediately after it happened.
Same with Pearl Harbor.
And then I really went back in time and read newspapers from even earlier in the century. And that got me interested in learning history for the first time.
I kept doing that occasionally all during my life up to the time the internet replaced the need for it.
I never read those books you referred to or any others like them.
I never had the attention span for full length books of any kind. I was weaned on television (some of which you yourself wrote LOL) which requires no attention span. And I've suffered with a benign degree of attention deficit disorder my whole life which didn't help matters either.
But that's not to say I haven't been a voracious reader all my life. Because that's what I have been. It's just that I've never read full length books, and instead I've always read dozens of different bits and pieces of writing coming from dozens of different writers in the space of time others have devoted to reading one full length book by one writer. And that includes both fiction and non-fiction and to be honest, sometimes it's pretty difficult to distinguish between the two. lol
BUT, with all that reading, I have learned how history has been written to suit the author. No different than how current events is being written now to suit whoever that author is too.
And I have learned about all the warts and blemishes that were covered up in the textbooks.
So I really have no sympathy for those who stay ignorant about our history. As I said, whatever they got "taught" in school is no excuse to me. I didn't get taught anything about history in school either.
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