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most Brits don't know about the war of independence.

I remember taking all different kinds of history classes in high school. I remember taking British History, not just American History classes. *nodding* I loved history despite being shit for remembering dates.
 
dolf said:
that's another one. you might imagine brits would be aware of the extent & type of US involvement, but our gramps & granny often don't like to talk about the war. it isn't really highlighted at school, so when y'all say that most brits just think ''that's nice, dear.''
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Or lack there-of.

Woof!
 
dolf said:
that's another one. you might imagine brits would be aware of the extent & type of US involvement, but our gramps & granny often don't like to talk about the war. it isn't really highlighted at school, so when y'all say that most brits just think ''that's nice, dear.''
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Gramps and Granny don't talk about the US involvement in the European Theatre, because Gramps was in North Africa or Italy, and Granny was being well fucked by GIs.
 
vetteman said:
Americans in your state anyway.
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SA-Palin-Boston.gif
 
oggbashan said:
Our history lessons don't really include the Pacific Theater. When I was at school in Australia, the war in the Pacific was given far more emphasis than the European theatre, even though Australians were prominent in both.

The Australian troops had difficulty forgiving the Brits for the surrender of Singapore. Too many Australians were sent there too late, and too many of them died as Prisoners of War held and worked to death by the Japanese.
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I just finished Max Hasting's book on the last year of the Pacific War, Nemesis, The Battle For Japan.

Hastings is always opinionated, and caught some flack for his handling of the Australian war effort, but it was a good read, and you would probably find it worth while.
 
Ishmael said:
Which they still owned after it was all sorted out.

Ishmael
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Kenneth Roberts wrote a wonderful book about Loyal Americans, OLIVER WISWELL. Roberts was an authority of New England History and the book doesn't flatter the Patriots treatment of the Loyalists, who had no dog in the fight.

We won independence because of Washingtons charisma, and the people he attracted. But most Patriots were corrupt pols, and many were vicious criminals.
 
JohnnySavage said:
Most Americans believe the Revolutionary War was fought for such noble ideas as liberty, freedom and self-determination. It was actually fought to protect the 1%ers of the time; who, roused the rabble to fight and die so they wouldn't have to pay taxes.


Not much has changed in the past 230 some years.
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the liberty, freedom and self-determination of the 1%

it was in the fine print.
 
JAMESBJOHNSON said:
Kenneth Roberts wrote a wonderful book about Loyal Americans, OLIVER WISWELL. Roberts was an authority of New England History and the book doesn't flatter the Patriots treatment of the Loyalists, who had no dog in the fight.

We won independence because of Washingtons charisma, and the people he attracted. But most Patriots were corrupt pols, and many were vicious criminals.
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Your words. Many were corrupt pols and some were vicious criminals. But many weren't, not unlike the politicians and criminals today in any political system anywhere.

Ishmael
 
JohnnySavage said:
Most Americans believe the Revolutionary War was fought for such noble ideas as liberty, freedom and self-determination. It was actually fought to protect the 1%ers of the time; who, roused the rabble to fight and die so they wouldn't have to pay taxes.
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Actually, what frightened our FFs was the English ruling class. They did not want to wind up like the Scots and the Irish, toiling for English absentee landlords. From The American Way of Strategy, by Michael Lind:

Many people remember vaguely that the American Revolution had something to do with taxes. A few remember that the issue was whether the power to tax lay with London or the American colonies. But this was a surrogate for the real issue: preserving the American way of life.

In the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, the British colonists in North America developed a distinctive way of life quite different from that of their British cousins. Something like Britain's aristocratic society endured in the South and parts of the Northeast. But in general, colonial society was characterized by a degree of middle-class prosperity and widespread property ownership unknown in any other society in the world. Not only were America's yeoman farmers, artisans, and merchants better off than most Britons and Europeans, but also the cost of government was much lower.

The trouble began in the aftermath of the French and Indian War (Seven Years' War) of 1754-63. The British imperial government insisted that the colonists pay more of the costs of their own defense. The colonists, however, feared that the London parliament was trying to destroy the system of colonial self-government that had grown up in the preceding generations. They remembered that the London parliament had destroyed the Scottish parliament in 1707 (it would eliminate the Irish parliament in 1801). They feared that the same thing was now happening to them. They would pay ever higher taxes, even as their colonial assemblies lost authority to the London parliament. As a result, British North America might come to resemble Ireland or Scotland, impoverished countries where absentee landlords held vast tracts of land and where major decisions were made by well-connected aristocrats and merchants in London with little or no accountability to the people whom they ruled.

<snip>

This history may be familiar but the point is not. For Americans, the independence of the United States from Britain and its organization as a democratic republic was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end was the safeguarding of the communal right to self-government and the individual liberties that the British settlers in America had already enjoyed for generations under British rule. Americans adopted their own strategy for defending the American way of life against imperial centralization -- independence as a democratic republic -- only because their first choice, self-government within a federal monarchical empire, was rejected. Democratic republicanism and national independence were only two of several possible methods for preserving what by 1776 was the traditional American way of life, characterized by personal liberty, widespread property ownership, low taxes, and an inexpensive military.
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Hard to believe now that Americans ever fought a war so they could have an inexpensive military . . .
 
dolf said:
Seriously, you ask the average Brit and they won't have a clue. American history isn't taught in school. I had no idea until it was mentioned enough times on lit for me to get curious.

It's funny/weird when you guys bring it up as something you think we're all bitter about.

...like how Brit footy fans think the Germans see us as arch rivals, the way Brit fans think of the Germans.
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I think that there are probably a lot of Americans who get shit faced drunk and blow shit up on the 4th of July who have no idea what they're celebrating.
 
The AWI was a British civil war where the King used German mercenaries in an attempt to crush his own people. But the Brits won.
 
I'm willing to bet a large some of money that more Brits know about the American War of Treason than know about the English Civil War.
 
You Brits avoid anything that makes you look bad. No wonder you don't teach it.
 
zipman said:
You Brits avoid anything that makes you look bad. No wonder you don't teach it.
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Actually, it's more to do with the fact that British history is about 3000 years or so and US history is about twenty minutes.
 
BBG1970 said:
Still it worked out ok. We gave them 50 old WW1 era destroyers, England gave us Chips n Fish, Birds Custard & Dolf. lol
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And we got leases that facilitated the USN dominance of the world's oceans, as Oggbashen pointed out. For example, Diego Garcia, whence most of the F-117 and a decent percentage of the B-52 strikes against Iraq & Afghanistan originated.

Queersetti said:
You probably still know as much about it as most Americans.
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Pretty much. American colonial history, unless one studies it at college, is pretty much this:
Columbus discovers the New World
The pilgrims arrive and invent Thanksgiving with their good buddies, the Indians
England taxes tea and a bunch of guys dressed like Indians have a party
Declaration of Independence signed, we win and everyone lives happily ever after.

KingOrfeo said:
An Englishman is a German who has forgotten that his grandmother was Welsh.
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Okay, now that's funny!
 
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