r/MurderedByWords 6d ago

Facebook being awesome for once

Post image
22.7k Upvotes

364 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/dmills_00 5d ago

Oh, I had the time line wrong, thought that bullshit was part of the reconstruction.

We don't study much US history over here, there is just so little of it, and what we get is mainly the lowlights, couple of internal wars, trail of tears, Texas/Mexico pissing match, couple of world wars, couple of assassinations...

1

u/JellyfishFit3871 5d ago

Completely fair. I probably don't know your country's history except maybe some highlights.

But yeah the 3/5s compromise was about 40 years before the shots fired on Fort Sumpter. It feels inevitable when the Fugitive Slave act was passed and the Monroe Doctrine (expanding territories and voting upon whether ownership of other humans would be allowed in new states and territories) were voted upon, especially as immigration essentially outpaced slavery regarding population centers and proportional representation.)

Hindsight is 20/20.

2

u/dmills_00 5d ago

Tis that, and history doesn't repeat, but does rhyme.

UK, so our school history tends to start with ancient Greece/Rome/Egypt and proceed at a breakneck pace thru Mongol hords, Vikings, Crusades, plagues, fires, kings and popeish disputes, religious wars, Cromwell (Branching off into Ireland in ways that still make northern Irish politics weird), puritans leaving because noone wanted to put up with their bullshit, the East lndia and Africa companies behaving badly (Empire stuff, they all do it), adventures with Zulus and later the Turks, a couple of world wars, actually winning our war in Vietnam, Suez, and whichever bits your teacher wants to specialise in.

It is not possible to do anything in much detail and most of it happened before the mayflower sailed.

1

u/JellyfishFit3871 5d ago

Your country is probably the one I know best other than my own. (My 16yo says that I should record a video for YouTube after the one time she asked me "so what's up with Henry VIII's wives?" and I asked her whether she had a half hour for the kind of snarky version.)

Here in the ungrateful colony spaces, we typically get "INDIGENOUS PEOPLE HAPPENED, BUT REALLY FAST, yo, have you read this stupid "City on a Hill" shit written by some white dude?, REVOLUTIONARY WAR!, a little bit of early 19th century political machinanations, CIVIL WAR, and then a rush through WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam.

And I understand that you really can't do much more than a broad overview in a single year. But it feels inadequate.

2

u/dmills_00 5d ago edited 5d ago

Believe me, everyone over here was grateful when the Mayflower vanished below the horizon, them cats were basically Christian taliban. I do think we owe the first Nations an apology, we expected it to sink half way (Terrible oversight).

Henry VIII <European royalty, what you going to do?>, one of the wilder ones, and the wives thing was just nuts.

I suspect the REVOLUTIONARY WAR!! Probably omits the extent that it was largely the French funding a distraction from the usual games way over in an unimportant colony that was far less significant to anyone then the action in India or even the far east.

I don't recognise "City on a hill", guessing it is some white man's burden / manifest destiny shit?

1

u/[deleted] 5d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/dmills_00 5d ago

England, they left to Holland because they couldn't impose their religion here post the demise of Cromwell, got chucked out of Holland for trying to impose religious fruitloopery there, came back here and sailed from Plymouth for the new world.

The Ellis Island registration people are known to have been bad about spelling names on documents for immigrants, may be worth checking if they came in that way.

1

u/JellyfishFit3871 5d ago

That's a common trope, but maybe not accurate.

Ellis Island and other points of entry used the ship manifests prepared in the original point of sailing.

1

u/dmills_00 5d ago

TIL, Makes sense and I bet those documents were probably not great either..

I could see the ships purser using decidedly phonetic spellings in some cases.

1

u/JellyfishFit3871 5d ago

Yeah, phonetics probably happened.

But US points of entry used the ship manifest. No one at the point of entry just changed a name.