Response

In continuation on Jon's point, I have always found that history in America has been shaped more by the people who write it than the events that took place. A good example of this is the Vietnam war. Go to any american library and try to find a book on the Vietnam war that was written from the perspective of a vietnamese soldier. You can't. How is it reasonable to believe that we are learning an accurate history of the war when we only have literature from one side of the war. That's like asking a rapist if the sex was consensual without asking the victim. It was only recently that I learned that the Vietnam war is referred to as the American War in Vietnam and i've learned about it several times throughout my academic career. Unfortunately I only learned about it from american text. Another obvious example, which is finally beginning to right itself, is the perpetration of slavery. FIlm was a major industry after the civil war and during the Jim Crow laws and film even more than literature can at times be confused for reality. One of the first and more famous silent films was called "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915. It was famous for its innovative camera techniques and also its controversial promotion of white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan. The movie was a hit in the box office as well as a portrayal for many already racist americans of history in the eyes of the Klan. On the reverse side in 1977 the controversial and graphic depiction of the slave trade, "Roots" played eight episodes on ABC and stunned the nation with the realistic and malicious debotury that took place on the journey slaves took from Africa to America. It is almost impossible to expect someone to be passionate and intelligent enough about a subject to write about it without being bias, but that doesn't excuse the one sided history lessons that are the pillar of american education and film. For a country with a melting pot of cultures we certainly lack a sense of equality or variety in our history. Or was history just that one sided?