Columbus Day No More

[ursulav]

The Oatmeal has a great thing up about Columbus Day. Go read it, I’ll wait.

This was rather relevant to me today because I’ve been on planes a lot, and was reading A Voyage Long and Strange by Horwitz, which is about the stuff that happened in America between 1492 and the Pilgrims.

Spoiler: There’s a lot of it.

Every time I read anything about

Comments

[frostedblossom]

We didn't get the Salem Witch Trials over and over again (only once in high school, and that was mostly in English class while we were reading The Crucible). So I guess in that respect we were lucky. And I got to memorize a bunch of Native American tales in 2nd grade. Columbus was mostly a gloss-over.

Instead, we got the God-*&#@ed Donner Party. The Donner Party and how important it was to local history and how important it was to the Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny (it really wasn't) and blah, blah, blah wasn't it horrible how these people had to EAT EACH OTHER in order to survive. Over and over and over, every damn year until I wanted to scream for something about WWII instead.

My Dad, who grew up in Jersey, tells me he got the same treatment with the Revolutionary War instead. I think this one of those foibles that tend to be specific to a certain region. And now re-reading this I have realized just how damned strange education is in this country.

[neowolf2]

The Donner Party sounds like it would be more of a Home Economics topic.

[law_nerd]

Dinner Party Planning 101: What (not?) to do when more people show up than you've prepared to feed.

[frostedblossom]

*DIES LAUGHING FOREVER*

You win the internets today. :DDDDD

[ursulav]

Suddenly the Witch Trials don't seem so bad...

[ursulav]

And I should add that when I was in Arizona, we DID get a little time spent on the Anasazi, Hohokam and Mugollon cultures, and I think one or two Navajo myths. Which kinda makes the glossing over the Spanish even more bizarre, if you're talking local history...

[frostedblossom]

Yeah, that struck me as odd as a kid, too. I remember making walnut boats in Kindergarten to celebrate Columbus Day, then nothing until second grade when we learned the myths, then thinking WTF?! when I grew up and actually considered it.

Just out of curiosity, did the lessons on the Anasazi include all the wacko conspiracy theories, or did they manage to leave that out?

[ursulav]

They mostly avoided those. I mean, the Hohokam and the Mugollon were gone too, so no reason to single anybody in particular out for aliens.

[frostedblossom]

I'm glad you managed to avoid that bullet, then. :)

[mmegaera]

Ah. You went to school in California, too?

Don't forget Junipero Serra and all the Spanish missions (never mind that the only reason they exist was because the good fathers were able to enslave the local Indians).

I went to school in both California and Colorado, and so got state history in both places. My mother went to school in Louisiana, and her main memory of her state history class in high school was of two guys named Bienville and Aberville, who were brothers in spite of their last names.

[frostedblossom]

Nevada, actually! :D Mostly the same thing, although less on the missions, possibly because of all the Mormon presence here.

I would wonder how two brothers manage to have separate last names, except I had a pair of teachers like that in high school, too.

[aurora77]

Serra was a big topic. We even had a field trip to one of the missions. Not a word about the slaves.

I feel like got more (and better) history from documentaries and historical fiction books and movies than from school.

[bladespark]

I kept moving around, so I think that's why I didn't get the same thing over and over and over. I remember elementary in CA having a weird emphasis on Spanish missions, like that was the one and only thing that happened there before the gold rush. And of course in high school in Utah we got The Mormon Pioneers kind of way more than was really necessary, given that all of us had heard that story in full detail in church since we were four, so re-hashing it at school seemed utterly pointless... But I only got one round of each. Just a longer and more fulsome round than they really deserved.

[frostedblossom]

I think you got pretty lucky, then! :D If it wasn't the Donner party for us, it was the Comstock Lode and all that. I vaguely remember a bit about the Mormon pioneers, but it wasn't beaten to death like with you. I get the feeling that in Texas it's the Alamo constantly and my relatives in Pennsylvania tell me it's Gettysburg that gets repeated ad nauseum.

[archie_c]

In the UK all we learn about is WW1 and a tiny bit about the Romans. That's literally all that's in the curriculum. We don't even cover anything about the civil war, Normans, Vikings, Saxons the indigenous Picts and Celts or anything about the Scottish or Irish, we had to watch Hollywood films for that. Oh we did 6 weeks on the plague. No one took history as a choice. Not unless they suffered from narkolepsie. And I Love history but school did its best to make it mind numbingly boring.

"...the writing on the wall"

[devifemme]

Simon and Garfunkle had it nailed in "Kodachrome" 35 (!) years ago, "When I think back on all the crap I've learned in highschool / It's a wonder I can think at all..."