Were you taught about the less glamorous parts of American history in school?

[wimp]

Were you taught about the less glamorous parts of American (or your own country, if you're not American) history, like slavery, Japanese internment, and the conquest of the American Indians in school?

[Kleine Scheiße]

Yes, but not in detail enough to have done it justice. We spent far more time talking about our foreign policy misadventures and entanglements in the 20th century.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I remember two periods we learnt about American history: one was on the western expansion (manifest destiny, the mormons, Oregon trail etc) and on the civil rights movement. If I were to stretch, the things we covered in the Cold War were more focused on USSR foibles like the Prague Spring and the Afghan War rather than Vietnam.

As for Britain? We did a lot on the triangle trade, and also on the cruelties of the Industrial Revolution. I also believe we went over the Raj at some point.

[Storebought]

I took an AP US history class, and, yep, we completely skipped all of the Indian war details. Oh, and we skipped the repeated invasions of Canada in the Revolutionary and 1812 War discussions too.

As far as British history goes, they (looking at history modules from Oxford/Cambridge) seem to elide Hanoverian England. Yes, the UK has a longer history than the US, but that was a formative period and not just for the industrial revolution.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I taught myself more than most people learn in high school history classes, before I even got to high school, especially when it comes to the Civil War and World War II. I watched the History Channel religiously (back when it was actual history like Civil War Combat, Civil War Journal, endless documentaries about Hitler, Clash of Warriors, Time Team, etc.). I started this probably around the time I moved to NC, with fifth grade and then sixth is when it got going. I read pretty much every book on the civil war in my middle school library, I played games centered around history (Sid Meier's Civil War Collection, Railroad Tycoon, WWII FPS games, later the early Paradox titles like EU II and Victoria I), watched movies centered around history (and critiqued them like the Patriot), cartoons (Liberty's Kids when it was like new) and so on.

When I got to US History in Eight Grade, it was more about layering in blank spots and certainly when I got to Honors US History in High School, if I did not enjoy it so much I could have sleep walked it.

I started out in AP US but had to drop back to Honors. The teacher was great and I of course knew the material, but there was endless course work, book reports and projects that just inundated me right as the Great Recession got really bad, we had no income and I didn't have the mind to stress and spend so much time on those things. I sailed through Honors US with a different teacher and less homework and he also taught AP Euro, which I took and sailed through with far less "busy work" than AP US. One thing that I did get from this was that I showed up to class with "A Patriot's History of the US" and was reading it during some down time towards the end of the semester and he insisted that if I was going to read that, I should also read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" and he even gave me a copy. I ended up reading upwards of 100 pages a day at points and got through both texts within a short time (like two weeks I think), after graduating High School. The only two instances that come close to this pace of ripping through a text that comes close to this in my past would have been in spring of my 8th grade year, when I read a dense 1100 page book on Teddy Roosevelt's early years (again because I wanted to and had it not as an assignment) and in 2009 I read Wealth of Nations and then reread it in 2011, followed in quick succession by "Principles of Political Economy and Taxation" by David Ricardo.

So yes, I got the full serving of "less glamorous" aspects of History thanks to Zinn, though not as part of the curriculum and I did it because I wanted to. The books I read in Middle School all discussed slavery, the series Liberty's Kids did a pretty decent job on it and the curriculum in 8th grade US and High School History all included slavery, Native Americans and Japanese internment.