It's world history pre-1900 in general that bores me. I do like American History before 1900 but has to be after 1700...That 1608 Jamestown Colony crap gets old quick.

American History and Military History Post-1900 keep my attention. I don't want to hear about the Lost Roanoke Colony again. I don't want to hear about the exploration of El Salvador....again!

I want to hear about the major wars of the 20th Century. American schools don't teach enough of that IMO. For those of you who don't know, I am in High School. I'm between Cybermat and Dowly on the age scale. My American History book right now pretty much says that the Germans got ticked and invaded Poland. We, then, kicked some butt in Northern France...Then it goes on for 3 or 4 sections about the Japanese American Internment, the Holocaust, Women working in factories....you know....all the stuff that nobody wants to learn about. My current history teacher is a joke. I could teach the class better than her. She won't allow any movies to be shown and she won't go into detail about any of the battles. She doesn't like learning about the equipment of the different countries and the deciding factors in the war. (I'm gonna march right in there tomorrow morning and tell her about Hearts of Iron. If that fails...then maybe my Business teacher. :arrgh!: ) Even the WW1 Chapter covered more of the battles of the war than the WW2 Chapter does. It's rather disappointing really. The Cold War chapter looks just as bad. If the book took less time focusing on Women's Rights, Japanese American Internment, Mexican-American Riots, the Holocaust (Should be a seperate chapter), and the poor German citizens of the time...we could actually learn about the actual war.

The Vietnam War is one of the shortest chapters in the book...(Gee, I wonder why) and the Korean War is almost non-existant. I think there's a few pages on the Korean War and that's it. I really wish that they seperated the World War 2 chapter from the Human Rights stuff. They need to organize the book to have a Unit on World War 1 with a few chapters and a Unit for World War 2 with a few chapters. I've learned more on the internet than in History class. I love history. I can't get enough of World War 2 history. I think the public school system is failing in that department. They want us to grow up to hate war and hate our leaders because "We rounded up all the Japanese Americans and penned them up in cruel camps for 2 years." The book contains nothing about the horrible things the Japanese did to POW's and the Chinese. Just on the Internment and Holocaust. You're gonna love this next part....

The book contains nothing at all of the major Air battles or Naval battles. The Battle of Britain is mentioned in a paragraph or two and the Battle of the Atlantic apparently wasn't important enough to even be included. There's a picture and a caption telling about German U-boats.... :nope:

I offered to bring in The Enemy Below and some other movies to get a general idea of what happened but no...because we watched The Grapes of Wrath, we don't get to watch World War 2 movies.


My former teacher was much better but he retired. I would almost give my left arm to have that guy back teaching at school.


There's my rant about the teaching of the 20th Century Wars in American Schools.... :)

I agree with you here(and the others that posted similar sentiments) history is always "stylized" when you learn it in school.Then if you learn it post secondary it usually is still not 100% objective but from one slant or another.No one side is "perfect" or righteous in the end world wars are (generally speaking) several hundred thousand young men being told to kill several hundred thousand other young men for "freedom" in some shape or form.

I agree with that.

Most teachers I've had will skip chapters like that. The chapters are in the book but certain teachers will skip those to do other things. This year we learned about the Philippines and the Spanish American War and stuff I already knew....We learned about the Indian Removals and all the cruel laws other years...

You're doing yourself a great disservice, and I hope that someday you'll find out just how rich history - all history - can be.

It looks like you missed this thread:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=199110

Read the entries from February 15-23 to find out about Columbus the badass.

There are many cool things you probably don't know about Columbus and his contemproraries, about Washington and his friends. If all you care about is 20th-century warfare, then you might as well admit you don't care about history at all. I recently read a three-volume set on the economic causes and effects of naval warfare in the period from the Spanish Armada through the end of the British-French wars of the 1700s. Fascinating stuff. I'm also currently collecting music from the Baroque era, and concurrently reading about the composers and how they interacted with kings and princes.

Also, if you're not interested in the pre-1700s then you've probably missed out on one of the best series of novels ever written - The Three Musketeers and its four sequels. Poor you.

Poor me I guess. I just haven't found anything out of that time period that has caught my interest. I do care about history...just not the kind of history you enjoy. I'll eventually find something cool about it and want to study it. But atm, I'm big into the 20th Century Wars.

You also miss out on the Egyptians the Greeks Alexander the Great(still the greatest general in all history) Roman Empire,Hannibal,Julius Caesar,Augustus Caesar, Attila the Hun,The Dark Ages,the Vikings,The Crusades, Genghis Khan,and only over 1,000 years of other very interesting things that shaped the world in which we currently reside and that is only counting recorded history.

I'm sure you will. The big jolt for me was, believe it or not, watching Grand Prix racing films from the 1930s through the '50s, and playing a board game that covers those periods. Adolph Hitler attended the 1932 Italian Grand Prix and insisted that German start entering and winning races. This lead to Mercedes Benz becoming a major contender and to Ferdinand Porsche forming the Auto Union from four different companies. Their four-ring symbol can still be seen on the front of Audi cars today.

I was born in 1950. For a great many years history started and ended with World War Two. There was no ground war. Winston Churchill led the Americans to sink the Bismarck (Johnny Horton said so!) and the B-17 Flying Fortress and P-51 Mustang won the war all by themselves.

So there! :D

Not according to Robert E. Lee. :sunny:

I live in constant regret that I'll never get to study everything, that I've forgotten most of what I have read and my heart sinks every time I walk into the Main Salt Lake City Library and see 100,000 books I'll never get to read. And yet it's taking me forever to get through one little book on Medieval Europe from 300-1000. At least I finally finished the chapter on Charlemagne.

What does Early-20th Century Racing have to do with pre-1900 history?

And We're gonna find that German Battleship that's making such a fuss. We've got to sink the Bismarck cause the world depends on us! Hit the decks a'runnin boys and spin those guns around! When we find the Bismarck, we're gonna cut her down!

Well, actually, mentioning Hitler leads directly back to WW2, and WW2 was a direct result of WW1, which was a direct result of all the different land-grabs and wars of the 1800s, which were due to a reshuffling of the power bases formed when city-states finally developed into full-fledged nation-states in the 1400s, which came from the small city-state concept that finally developed out of the feudal system of the middle-ages, which formed after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which started developing when the original Roman city-state developed into the Republic and Carthage decide Rome had gotten too big for their britches.

So you see, World War 2 can be indirectly traced all the way back to Rome.

And that's just Europe.

That is true you do have to narrow down your interests some what the brain can only handle so much.

Robert E. Lee must have said that before the Civil War not after.He may have lost Gettysburg based on one order that he gave that was not clearly understood or rather the urgency of the order.For that reason I say that Alexander was the best general and in a certain way you could really argue that Hannibal was the best general even though he failed at his primary goal he almost made it and that was an achievement in its own right.

That's why I stick to 20th Century Warfare and General History.

I am open minded though...Raptor1 convinced me to try out that Europa Universalis 3 game...I'm gonna get the demo in a few days when HSFX6 is done. That might be the push off the cliff that I need. :hmm2:

It all depends...

@Steve. You're in a band! You should do "Sink the Bismarck" or "The Sinking Of The Reuben James" or even "PT-109" by Jimmy Dean and get it on video to upload on Subsim Day here in like a week.

My God Catfish, we created a monster! :haha: Thanks for putting a further point on it, the great disillusionment of the 1990s in Eastern Germany is something that I think is still being felt, but then we did just push both Germanies together and hoped for the best. Generally speaking it's come out alright, but it could have gone a lot smoother.


In regards to historical interests, funnily enough the Pacific war has been something of a gray area for me, it's not taught much beyond the events of Pearl Harbour and the atomic bombings, not even the fall of Singapore or the sinking of the Repulse and Prince of Wales...perhaps, that is a part of history that we're keen not to remember.
It's only been through playing A World At War as Japan on here (which I must PM joe about) and reading several books that has educated me more on the subject, but there's still lots of gray areas, one of them being the submarine war...I must get around to installing SHIV some time and changing that.
In regards to our educational system, the standard GCSE history covered the history of Britain as being the Romans, the Battle of Hastings, a VERY brief touch on the War of the Roses (I mean, like one lesson), the Tudors, a brief mention of the Civil war, the Victorians, and the two world wars. All of them touched on in brief details, in fact, I think my primary school in Kent covered things in more detail than the Middle and High Schools in Suffolk did, but that could just be my jaded imagination. We also covered in GCSE history the American drive west, basically the traditional Cowboys and Indians with some settlers thrown in, and we also covered 'The Irish Question' which was quite in topic at the time since it was when the Northern Ireland Peace Process was happening.
In A levels we went on to study World War Two in a bit more detail (but still not enough detail for me, I used to study the battles and draw maps to help illustrate the point) and again, seriously neglecting the Pacific theatre but it did include the Russian front in quite a bit of detail, Kursk and so forth.
We also studied Weimar Germany and both Hitler and Stalins rises to power, comparing the two and studied the English Civil War in much greater detail, including the fun and games of the Quakers and Levellers and other such radical religious groups of the time.

Honestly though, a great deal of my historical knowledge has come from playing games based in the era, watching films based in the era and reading up about the era. I knew very little about the Byzantine Empire until I played it as a recommendation by Medieval: Total War (Hey, want an easy game, try the Byzantines it said, or something like that) and I had such a great time that it's endeared the Byzantines to me ever since.
I played Rowansofts Battle of Britain when it first came out, and I watched the film, and then I read, and I read, and now I'd like to think that I have a pretty good understanding of it.

Your tastes will vary, you may rule out America pre-1900, but one day you will watch a film or play a game and you'll think "Hey, that's a pretty awesome thing" and you'll research it, and maybe you'll watch another film based around the era, and so on and so forth until a great interest is built around it. That's how these things grow.

Certainly though, there is a rich tapestry in both the US civil war (which is another area I know very little about) and the politics in Europe where Germany, Britain, France and Russia tiptoed around each other until the whole thing came to a head in 1914. The 'Great Game' for example is a fascinating example of war by proxy and the book by Peter Hopkirk of the same name should be required reading for any nation looking to go into Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires.
Of course, I'm bias to that era since it's the last time that Britain exerted any great political and military influence on the world before the decline following WWI where America rose to take Britains place as the worlds dominant superpower. Also my favourite novel is set in 1898, so I have a bit of a fondness for the era.

However, there is no harm in focusing on one particular area, certainly the twentieth century has a live tapestry of interest, and the advantage is that artifacts from it are more readily accessible than from much earlier eras, particularly if you are in America...not many Roman villas to tour or castles to explore, and it's better documented than some eras.

But never lose sight of the fact that each era has been influenced directly and indirectly by the era before it, and the era before that. As Steve points out, World War Two can be traced back to the Romans, which might explain Italys reluctance in fighting it (j/k). :O:

Actually all wars can be traced back to two cavemen.One caveman created the first version of Rock,Paper,Scissors of course paper and scissors not having been invited yet the game was first called Rock,Leaf and the rock always one because it could be honed into a blade cutting the leaf.

Anyway long story short one caveman kept beating the other and the losing cave man smashed the winners head in with a rock in turn the winning caveman's tribe killed the losing caveman this upset the losing caveman's tribe and a series of battles in sued they where all stale mates so a treaty was agreed to sadly this treaty was settled with another game of Rock,Leaf.

That statement right there sums up how I found Subsim.com and how i discovered the naval world. :up: