School Post

This is technically a school post I suppose.

Taking a class on the American West busts some misconceptions I had about a few areas of the United States prior to their inclusion into the country... some prior to being a country at all.  Specifically a few things stood out...


What do you mean there were tons of different countries facilitating a huge and complex trade system in the Pacific Northwest during the early 19th century when most people thing it was some woodsy wasteland????

Russians?  Yes Russians... so many Russians in fact that they petitioned Catherine the Great to give them the money to colonize and claim areas in the Pacific Northwest as Russia.  

There were Russians, British, Californians, Mexicans (technically from the same country but you wouldn't dare say that to the Californians), Anglo-Americans, and tons of native groups... there were forts, vast trade houses, villages, cities... I was pretty much like wow... and yea I knew some of it... 


This goes to something I said a few weeks ago to someone who took my words completely wrong and thought that when I said:  "They didn't teach history right then..." as "You are an idiot."

Now I know that those two statements are completely different, but I cannot make this stuff up.


I've believed this for a long time... since I learned that Columbus never made it HERE or the fact that history books stop talking about Helen Keller as a kid because they really do not feel like getting into the fact that she was a pretty aggressive women's rights activist in her time or that she became a communist....
(I guess it hurts her image)
OR that most students do not even know what the Whiskey Rebellion is.... to be fair, the Whiskey Rebellion is a personal pet peeve because I believe that it says a lot about the instability of the United States in the beginning and how quickly the United States went to war over the same tax issues that supposedly caused the Revolution only a few years prior... excise taxes... and yet those who rebelled...needed excise taxes... Its a big deal and a text book I have from about 10 years ago that I used in a paper I wrote on the topic... mentions it in passing in one paragraph...the book is on American history and its pretty big... but the Whiskey Rebellion gets a paragraph...kind of.  

The rebellion took years mind you... years... and it gets a paragraph.

riiiight....

Back to the West....we don't hear about how integrated many societies out west were for a period of time and how important it was for men who wanted to be successful in the West to marry into native groups... only once the American squatters refused to stop encroaching over and over onto native lands, bringing their own racial classifications did those systems and cultures start to break down... relegating anyone who had mixed heritage into a lower class where people lost their influence, their businesses, wealth, and their lands... just because they were part Indian.

It is one of those nights...