What your textbooks didn’t tell you.

If your and American you probably learned about Christopher Columbus at school. Yes you probably know he didn’t discover America and they there were other people their first. I’m guessing you also learned about the pilgrims and the civil war. But what you probably learned was twisted up and warped. The textbooks want American history to look happy, they want kids to think America is the greatest country and it never makes mistakes. What’s wrong with loving your country? Nothing! But what I love about this country is our freedoms, and I think we should have the freedom to know what really happened in our history, the good and the bad. At school we are focusing on American history. I took my dads book “lies my teacher told me” and read it after class so I see both sides of the story. So far we have got to about the 1870s. Because a whole timeline would be very long and boring I am summarizing what my dads book said, along with some other information. I am not plagiarizing, the book is just my main source.

I wrote a blog on Columbus a while ago so I will only sum this part up to avoid being repetitive. First of all, Columbus didn’t sail to prove the earth was round, educated people knew that thousands of years before Columbus. Columbus did not befriend the natives, that’s far from the truth. In reality he brought many of them back to Spain as slaves, most of them died on the ship. Some people in his crew tried to take young girls and force them to have sex, when they didn’t the crew raped them, some of them as young as ten. They also brought viruses from Europe that the natives did not have immunity too. Eventually life for the natives became so awful that many took their own life’s. Woman began to abort there children at birth because they believed the children would be happier dead. Within 50 years the population had been wiped out. We know all of this because Columbus and some of his crewmates kept diaries.

About 150 years later pilgrims began to settle in new England. The pilgrams, like Columbus brought viruses. You probably think that black death wiped out the most people of any epidemic that people can remember, but the sicknesses the Europeans brought killed 90% of the natives in coastal New England within three years. The black death only killed around 30% of the population in Europe. The pilgrims didn’t “start from scratch” they often robbed from the natives. Although some of the natives tried to be nice to the white people the settlers still thought of them as nonhuman.

Many kids are shocked to learn the George Washington owned slaves. African slaves had been in America sense about 1526. Another thing many people are shocked to learn is that Abraham Lincoln didn’t free the slaves, he just wanted to save the country. He didn’t like slavery, but he didn’t really do much to stop it. The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free the slaves, the 13th amendment did. It just showed Lincoln wasn’t a fan of slavery. I’m not saying he wasn’t a good president I am just saying he got credit for something he didn’t do.

I don’t know if I will write a follow up to this. But thanks for reading. If I made any mistakes on facts I am not aware of that, I just use Wikipedia sometimes.
Posted on April 2nd, 2008 at 04:59pm

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