A Brief History of....

One thing that moving to America has allowed me to do is to delve into American history a bit more than i probably would've done had i remained in the UK. Whilst I was aware of American history to a point - indeed, part of my GCSE Modern History course was studying America in the 1920s and 1930s - I didn't know a lot beyond the basics. The Mayflower, independence, civil war etc. etc. etc. (Tracey, i'm sure you'll be disappointed in me). Perhaps, then, i should feel less guilty about it all - as through my various daily activites, it's come to my attention that, actually, a surprising amount of everyday Americans are surprisingly ignorant of history. Now, this is nothing to unusual in terms of history of the rest of the world, but given that this is a country were something built in 1850 is ancient - and that they have so little history (which is often pointed out to me), you'd think that they'd at least no some of it.

The thing that bought this to mind, actually, is not so much a direct history related event. When I was getting my hair cut the other day, the hairdresser asked me if I was ready for Thanksgiving and I said 'Yes. Just about, although it's not something that i'm used to celebrating'. Naturally, she twigged the accent and guessed that I was from Eng-er-land. And then she asked me if we had Thanksgiving over there and when i replied 'no', she was surprised. 'Why not?' was the next question - and I gave her a brief history of it all (as I mentioned in my post this time last year). And she really had no idea about it all - not what Thanksgiving originally meant, nor why it's celebrated still. I guess to her it was just an excuse to eat a lot (well, given the size of her...) Okay, so you could say 'well, she was just a hairdresser' but believe me, it doesn't end there. I've even had medical students in my department being completely unaware of a number of major historical happenings over here. When you think about it, I suppose this could explain why a lot of mistakes of the past seem to keep on coming round again and again.