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...according to history as written by the same former wehrmacht generals.
Who could have known it the better than those guys? They had all the information
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It's quite understandable that US historiography makes a big deal out of the places where the nation was first formed. But it also, rightly, makes a big deal out of its expansion across the continent. It used to write that part of the story from only one perspective, now it has learned to include another, but it still neglects an important third.
Native American societies west of the Mississippi were fundamentally transformed by interaction with the Spanish, from which they got guns and horses, which allowed them to roam wider and hunt more effectively, to gather a surplus for trade, to wage wars on their neighbors for more trade and more hunting grounds. What the US encountered there was barely older than its own first settlements and just as dynamic. The driving forces for that dynamism came out of Spanish colonization.
The US acquisition of Texas results from Mexican unrest in the first years after liberation from the Spanish. Struggles over a new constitution and particularly over the degree of centralization led to a series of revolts, leading the government to lose both income and authority. It allowed the Texan provincial government to import settlers from the US to shore up its tax base, which radically changed its ethnic composition and led to further resistance to centralization, this time boosted by cross-border support from American adventurers. They rebelled and in their last desperate battle got lucky, but their luck depended on internal dynamics within Mexico that drove its president to personally lead the forces suppressing a minor provincial rebellion.
The story about American pioneers settling a wilderness has been modified already, most US histories acknowledging that Native Americans altered their environment in their own way. But they didn't live in towns so we hear about the towns founded by Americans. We still don't hear about the many towns founded by Spanish and Mexican pioneers, about the way they shaped their environments. We don't hear about their laws and their property, we don't hear whether the US recognized their rights or robbed them of their homes. The territory seized from Mexico in 1848 comes to 15% of the total US territory (including Alaska) and that's not counting Texas which the US reckons it had annexed earlier (though Mexico hadn't recognized that). That's just too much to be considered niche.
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Depends where you live.
IIRC, US public schools teach state history before national history. Granted, it is all in elementary school, so I doubt much will be remembered. Still, if you live in California or Texas, my guess is you have gotten a good dose of that along the way.
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I vaguely recall mention of Spanish settlements in the American SW, particularly in California and Texas, in early grade school classes, so it wasn't 100% overlooked. The English and French settlements got most of the attention, but then again, they made up the largest parts of the land and population. The native population got the short end of the deal in terms of historical coverage. Now we play up the natives and play down the Spanish, unless you're in the areas where they had the most direct influence.
Hmm, property rights, that's very much a niche of legal history to me. Besides, weren't the Spanish colonies and their offspring organized so that property was just in the hands of very few people? What kind of interesting story is there to tell, that doesn't make a modern high school student who actually likes history, intensely dislike the Spanish and Mexican 19th civilizations.
As for the "dynamic" pre Pilgrims native societies... Sure I read 1491 too. But the vibe I got from it was not that native civilization pre pilgrims was something worth studying outside of anthropology classes. The story I picked up was, that there used to be settled, well organized, mighty civilizations (mound builders) but for some climatic or other reason they collapsed, and then there were more regional but still well organized civilizations, which in turn collapsed to disease megadeath from Coronado's explorers and other Columbian disease vectors. And the small scale, not very organized, tribal, papua new Guinea style living natives that the pilgrims ran into, were survivors, like mad max dystopian post apocalyptic survivors. There's a lot to study for anthropology but for high school history class? I don't see it inspiring a lot of interest.
Read it again, I'm not talking about pre-Colombian, I'm talking about Comanches, Cheyennes, Sioux etc. Is there any schoolboy who doesn't love reading about the daring raiders of the Great Plains? It's true enough about the imported European pandemics but the survivors got up and did stuff. The Comanches fought off the most powerful colonial empire of their time while riding animals and using weapons totally unknown to their grandfathers. You think Spanish colonial society is boring while the (highly distorted) view you have of it is straight out of Zorro? Weird. You don't have to be a brilliant teacher to tell a story about class and race distinctions, centralization and local autonomy, when that iconic hero practically hands you the themes on a platter.
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If "inspiring a lot of interest" in grade school students is your criterion for inclusion, I fear you're going to have to cut a lot more than pre-contact Amerindians.
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Frankly, studying the ways civilizations change and collapse under the influence of climate, disease, and invasion is arguably much more relevant to our present situation than memorizing the Presidents.
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Hmm I guess I am kind of biased, history education in my day and age was supposed to teach kids about how we got to where we are, and what the great trends in history are / were. We (1990s west Germany) mostly covered the middle ages, 1848 revolution, Bismarck, industrial revolution, and... Hmm that was all that stuck? Maybe a little bit of 1914/1918 November revolution iirc. The Romans and Germanic past didn't feature a whole lot. The Nazis also not that much, I think we covered them in middle school when I didn't pay much attention.
History education is to a large degree about choosing which reference frames for their social and political situation kids / young adults should be taught. In my day and age the people who made the curriculum thought we should learn how modern society in general came to be, and how German striving for democracy in since the 19th century happened, and what the great trends were in that regard. The protagonists, the antagonists, what went on in their heads. I distinctly remember an assignment where my group had to work out why Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia refused the crown from the gutter, from his point of view. I got a lot of good thinking out of that, and so did the other 2-3 kids who cared about history.
When you look at what's essentially prehistory, precolumbian north America, you really have to wonder, what's the message that kids take home from all that? Sure the Comanche are cool, raiding is cool, maize is cool. But what's the big picture? A huge story of how a world went to from greatness to shit, and never came back? Disease, despair, desolation and destruction? Why is that a story worth investing what is going to be a full school year's history classes into? Your going to turn the smart kids into depression and nihilism.
Same about Spanish north America. That's an era which is long past and where the overarching story is also about how things came to an end, got overrun and marginalized, and withered under the overwhelming material and spiritual power of Anglo American culture.
Why not teach kids something more positive, that's not just a lot of old prehistory or old tales about how things were before everything was exchanged for what's there now. Sure, when you're teaching regional history then all of that belongs in there, regional history is about a place and its role in history, not about a grand story of a nation.
But if I was making a curriculum for us history I really wouldn't put a lot of emphasis on prehistory and the Spanish period. Because it's just not very consequential for the nation and society of the United States as they are now.
If you have a different view about what kids will take from it, im curious to hear it.
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I have already demonstrated that was hugely consequential. I have demonstrated that it can hold the kids attention. I have demonstrated that it is a story of renewal and invention. Your objections are based on the way you perceive the topic, not on what I presented and clearly not on what professional historians are writing. I fear that your argument boils down to "I only know this stuff from bad history, therefore it can only be bad history."
...came to an end, got overrun and marginalized, and whatever withered under the overwhelming material and spiritual power of Austria.
Hm. I see your point.
Right outside of Houston is the city of Sugarland, built on an old sugar plantation that was built using slave labor. There is restoration on a building discovered to be the original floor for making sugar which had been written about but not actually seen, if money can be found for such a project.
Florida, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Lousiana all were directly inhabited by 'Spain' at one time or another in some numbers where you can trace the histsorical roots and settlements by following the Mission Trails.
When you get to the Mississippi, it's French but control changes from time to time until Napoleon sells it to Jefferson with a few acres of backcountry.
Oh, and a couple of one sided wars fought by brave Americans consolidating American spekaing peoples into one volk to create one nation under God.
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Ha, well that was actually very interesting to learn about. Basically, aside from a number of people who had to go into exile, the majority of people who ran the 1848/49 parliament and the movements became cheerleaders for the Prussian unification 20 years later. In their writings private and public, they regretted that they couldn't have a real parliament as envisioned in 1848 but were happy that the unification was finally about to happen. The joy weighed more than the regret so they cheered Prussia at every turn from 1863 to 1871. Was very interesting to see how the Kaiserreich came to enjoy the support of the very same people who had strived for parliament and accountable government back in the day.
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...and Hungary WAS overrun, marginalized, and withered by the overwhelming material and spiritual power of Austria during the revolt in 1848, particularly when the Austrian Emperor called on his Russian cousin to assist.
I'm curious about how you formulated that position on California and Texas
Taking that sort of perspective is one of the ways you can structure thinking about history, but it has substantial limitations. One of those limitations is that it inevitably glosses over whatever societies and movements were not influential in (or are not seen to be influential) in the present paradigm: into that rubbish bin go most indigenous cultures (because they had to be cleared for glorious Anglo American civilization to shine) and so does Hispanic America (because good ol' industrious WASP pioneer America needs a violent, extractive, Black Legend-y, catholic and 'decadent' foil).
What good Barsoom has pointed out is that there are centuries of contact between Hispanic civilization in the New Wold and the Native peoples of the Plains and Southwest. Now, this contact was definitely brutal, but despite it and the other brutal effects of the Columbian exchange on these populations, they managed to improvise, adapt and overcome in a way that makes them out to be much more active and engaging than the usual Dances-With-Wolves 'good savage'. And that is eminently important in current affairs, if we are to use that as a criterion for the worthiness of teaching history - it rehabilitates their descendants as bearers of active and evolving cultural heritages, rather than as mere bearers of antediluvian relics and stories.
I believe that you are failing to see the richness of these contacts and this history precisely because you are begging the question. If you take it as a given that these stories need not be retold because their cultures have 'failed' to come out on top of the pile, then you can hardly begin to value them.
If I can wax poetic for a second: history doesn't have to be a simple recounting of everything that ever happened, but if all you are looking at is how we got to here, you are going to gloss over a lot of things that deserve to be looked at on their own terms, not just in relation to our own Western, capitalistic, highway-and-subway-having urban sprawl.
Do I think that all of this complexity can be pushed onto your average 14 year-old (and I would include myself in that count when I was that age)? Probably not. But you can at least try to, rather than reinforcing the righteousness of the current state of things, which contemporary culture already does enough of a job upholding.
Lastly, thanks to all of you for the interesting discussion, been a while since I've gone here and seen such an interesting thread. Cheers.
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