• hawkwind@lemmy.management
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    1 year ago

    Canada here. Basically, everything I learned is from parodies. American history is not a big deal in K-12 curriculum. If i had to write a 2 paragraph essay to save my life:

    It was a period in history where guns were loaded one ball at a time by stuffing it down the barrel with a stick. Wealthy white people who profited off slavery all lived in the southern states for some reason. This group started to hear that other people in the rest of the (northern) states were starting to talk about making slavery illegal. To protect their interests they formed a separate government, formed an army and attempted to overtake and rule all of the states.

    Their army wore red, and the north’s defending army wore blue. They shot at each other with cannons for a few years and many people died, mostly from shitty health-care and infections rather than acute death. The north won and now lots of people who were never in the war, pretend to have the war again to remind them to never have a civil war.

    I’d say the impact was that slavery was abolished, but it was abolished in many other countries without a civil war so I guess the impact was a lot of parody material for pop culture.

    And that is all I know about Paul Revere and the American Revolution.