BellaOnline Forums Education History Disappointing History

As you were learning history, what thing disappointed you the most?

The treatment of the first peoples of this land, Native Americans, and the way history was falsified with much of the history of these people.

Every moment in history when people when enslaved, raped, killed or slaughtered. Too many such moments from the dawn of man to today to count.

The Civil War

Disappointing moments in American History

1. The Articles of Confederation
2. Slaves = "2/3" of a person for the purpose of proportional representation in Congress for the slave holding states.
3. Failure to resolve the question of the expansion of slavery as new States were added to the Union.
4. The ruling of the Dred Scott case.
5. The Civil War, 1861-1865
6. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln
7. The failure of Reconstruction
8. The massive growth of the corporate Robber Barons of the late 19th Century. They were more powerful than the federal government and in many ways owned the Congress.
9. The Supreme Court rules "Separate But Equal" is Constitutionally legal.
10. Lack of economic regulation and over extended credit used to invest in Wall Street helping to cause the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
11. The assassinations of Presidents Garfield and McKinley.
12. Failures of Coolidge and Hoover to respond to the start of the Great Depression.
13. The internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry into internment camps.
14. Senator Joseph McCarthy and The Communist scare of the 1950s.
15. Gen. McArthur's threat to invade China.
16. The Bay of Pigs fiasco
17. The Assassination of John F. Kennedy.
18. The assassinations of Malcom X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy
19. The escalation of Vietnam War
20. Watergate
21. Failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.
22. Iranian Hostage crisis 1979-1980
23. The loss of the Challager and Columbia space shuttles
24. Iran-Contra scandal
25. Exxon Valdez oil spill
26. Clinton sex sandal
27. Supreme court deciding the 2000 Presidential election
28. Sept. 11, 2001
29. The Iraq War.
30. BP Oil spill

those are just a few examples. It is certainly not a complete list.
20.

Great ones. Really loved the list.

Expanding on this. What things did you learn later in life that revealed a lie in your history education?

I don't remember being taught anything that was an outright lie, but many things were over simplified or skipped over completely.

In school we are often taught about Columbus' arrival in North America in 1492, but almost nothing the period from 1493 to 1775. We are taught about the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution and the Constitution. However, we are not taught about the period from 1788 to 1860, including the War of 1812, the Andrew Jackson presidency or the Mexican American War. We are taught about the Civil War, but almost nothing about Reconstruction. So many important periods and events in American History as skipped over or given little attention in history classes. This is due partly to there being so little time to cover so much history in American History classes.

Your last statement caught me. I've always been disappointed that we were not able to really get into the history of things. But that is coming from someone who loved the subject, while not all students did.

History is probably my best subject, at least since my college years. The problem I find with the majority of history classes is they are survey classes, meaning the cover a vast amount of history in a short period of time. My world history classes were "Ancient history to 1500 CE". My second world history class covered "1500 CE to the Present". That is an awful lot of history to cover in one semester. The same is true for American History classes I have taken. One semester many years ago I took a Russian history class. In that one semester we covered nearly a thousand years of Russian history and by the end of the semester we had barely reached the period of the 1917 Russian Revolution. I remember very little from that class now. What I am saying is history classes commonly cover a board expense of history while rarely going into any depth of the subject. It is difficult to understand the impact of history if all we do is skim the surface of it.

True. I'm looking at going back to school to get my master's. Looking at the classes, I was surprised that you take such few really in depth courses to be considered a master in the subject.