I grew up in MD and didnçt hear about the coal mine wars (1) until last year, which However, it could have been fairly important and impactful history for the region. However, I could have very well just not been paying attention.
From my wife the American education system only covers the parts where they did “good”, that’s not prioritization that’s deliberately selective rewriting of history.
Covering the war of independence and the civil war in huge detail but skipping the less palatable parts of its own history results in an huge portion of the country not understanding what the effected groups are complaining about.
Think: if you aren’t aware of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments or the difference in quality of treatment at black vs white hospitals you think black people are just being stupid for not trusting the medical establishment.
If you don’t know about things like the Tulsa bombing you think black people are being hysterical when they say the government wants to exterminate them.
How many Americans know that the Japanese internment camps resulted in many japanese Americans losing all of their assets: many (most?) didn’t get their homes back when they were released from imprisonment.
The purpose of history is to teach history, and selective coverage results in people having a functionally delusional view of other people’s experience.
To the extent that if you bring these things up people think you’re attacking America, when in reality you’re just trying to get people to avoid repeating past mistakes.
> From my wife the American education system only covers the parts where they did “good”, that’s not prioritization that’s deliberately selective rewriting of history
This is pretty common among other countries. A big one is Britain's Colonial history. It isn't part of school curriculum in Britain.
The Tulsa Race Riot is the nastiest incident in America's nasty history of racism, and it's not as long ago as one might hope.
Personally, I hope America one day fully comes to terms with her history, rather than continually sweeping things under the rug, leaving people uneducated about history innocently asking why others, educated about history, can't just "get over it."
Some years back, I decided to dig into stuff completely counter to what I'd learned growing up. And sure enough, most of it seemed really crazy, not reality-based at all. At first. But I kept reading, and sometimes I'd look up other--more mainstream--books to see if such-and-such was even true. Over the long haul, it really dramatically changed how I view... everything.
It took a long time and a lot of reading, so I'm not surprised when I see people respond with disbelief and dismissal to things I (now) know are definitely true. After all, schools are generally operated by and supportive of some central authority or another (government, church, etc), so it's not really in their interests to teach us to question authority.
Not only that it happened, but that no one was held accountable. The restitution so far has been a memorial and a few hundred college scholarships? The article mentions some "economic development" as well but the source is paywalled.
I read about it a few years ago and was as surprised as all of you are.
In case people are wondering why it is all over the press, the HBO series Watchmen (apparently, only tangentially related to the comic/movie of the same name) just launched this past Sunday and it opens with a dramatization of this event.
Reading about it doesn't really capture what it is like to see the dramatization.
Behold the self-destructive power of fake news and misinformation.
I imagine something similar could happen today where a fake news tweet/story ignites violence between two political/religious/ethnic groups that are on edge with each other.
Yes, these kinds of things were key parts of the Rwanda genocide (radio broadcasts urging Hutus to kill Tutsis in "self defense") and the Myanmar ethnic cleansing of the Rohinga people (driven in part by Facebook postings and admitted by Facebook, see https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
I moved to Tulsa a few years ago, and hadn’t known about the race riots until recently!
The funny thing is that I only learned about it after strolling in Guthrie Green garden and digging about it!
It’s amazing how close I lived to the “Black Wall Street“ and didn’t have a clue about its days of glory and gloomed until I opened up the Wikipedia article!
1921. Good riddance to those kinds of problems. Mobs of people shooting at each other, based on skin color! 10,000 residents left without homes. Unimaginable.
100 years later, thank God things moved in a better direction. Still progress to be made, but we're definitely in a better place than this.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 64.0 ms ] thread1.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_coal_wars
There's a million interesting stories in history.
Covering the war of independence and the civil war in huge detail but skipping the less palatable parts of its own history results in an huge portion of the country not understanding what the effected groups are complaining about.
Think: if you aren’t aware of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments or the difference in quality of treatment at black vs white hospitals you think black people are just being stupid for not trusting the medical establishment.
If you don’t know about things like the Tulsa bombing you think black people are being hysterical when they say the government wants to exterminate them.
How many Americans know that the Japanese internment camps resulted in many japanese Americans losing all of their assets: many (most?) didn’t get their homes back when they were released from imprisonment.
The purpose of history is to teach history, and selective coverage results in people having a functionally delusional view of other people’s experience.
To the extent that if you bring these things up people think you’re attacking America, when in reality you’re just trying to get people to avoid repeating past mistakes.
This is pretty common among other countries. A big one is Britain's Colonial history. It isn't part of school curriculum in Britain.
The Tulsa Race Riot is the nastiest incident in America's nasty history of racism, and it's not as long ago as one might hope.
Personally, I hope America one day fully comes to terms with her history, rather than continually sweeping things under the rug, leaving people uneducated about history innocently asking why others, educated about history, can't just "get over it."
It took a long time and a lot of reading, so I'm not surprised when I see people respond with disbelief and dismissal to things I (now) know are definitely true. After all, schools are generally operated by and supportive of some central authority or another (government, church, etc), so it's not really in their interests to teach us to question authority.
Plus, reality is exhausting and sad.
In case people are wondering why it is all over the press, the HBO series Watchmen (apparently, only tangentially related to the comic/movie of the same name) just launched this past Sunday and it opens with a dramatization of this event.
Reading about it doesn't really capture what it is like to see the dramatization.
I imagine something similar could happen today where a fake news tweet/story ignites violence between two political/religious/ethnic groups that are on edge with each other.
The Wilmington Insurrection is comparable and similarly unknown. Totally shameful, bothxrhat they happened and further that we aren't aware.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1...
100 years later, thank God things moved in a better direction. Still progress to be made, but we're definitely in a better place than this.