Of course in US schools, the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants is usually whitewashed; the curriculum sort of leaves you with the impression that North America was some vast, sparsely-populated land the white folks were just looking for some "elbow room". But the European colonial period, here that's usually just colored blobs on the map. I'm curious as to how this is taught in European classrooms. Any sort of reflection at all on how evil this was?
All of my British friends have told me that they barely learned anything about the empire at all. They spend a lot of time on kings and queens, rather than learning about how the British empire came to be
I've found that a lot of British people, even lefty ones, are just ignorant about the crimes of the British empire because it's not something that ever comes up in school. Most of them have no idea that Cromwell committed genocide in Ireland or that the potato famine was an extremely intentional genocide or that the black and tans burnt Cork to the ground, and so on
Yeah as much as I love Mike Duncan, his "History of Rome" podcast sorta devolves into "History of Roman Emperors". US history kinda does this too with presidents, though they are sure to include plenty of war stuff too.
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Mike Duncan even points this out at the beginning of History of Rome, early Roman history is all attributed to Romulus since it was easier to tell the story of one great man creating all of the roman traditions than them slowly being adopted over the years
Also most of the primary sources were written by members of the patrician class about other members of the patrician class. Modern scholarship has had to rely on results from archeology and secondary sources to do a better job of understanding roman society outside of the ruling class' petty power struggles.
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