What are some bits of American history most Americans aren’t aware of?

37 comments

1. VT was briefly its own republic

2. Russian colonization of the Pacific Northwest isn’t really covered much in American history.

3. I think the Spanish-American War and the subsequent Philippine-American War are comparatively obscure.

4. We learned of the Spanish American war, mostly because of geography (school in Florida) but I don’t recall the Philippines American war.

5. I think the various violent labor battles of the late 19th/early 20th century

6. Japanese invasion of Alaska in WW2

7. The Philadelphia police conducted an aerial bombing of a house belonging to a black liberation group and killed 11 people, after firing a documented 10,000 rounds of ammunition into the house.

8. After the end of World War I, [eight American soldiers went AWOL in an unauthorized attempt to kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm II and drag him to France where he would face a trial for war crimes](https://np.reddit.com/r/HistoryAnecdotes/comments/ou0tkd/the_unauthorized_attempt_by_eight_americans_to/). Along the way their car broke down, they spent almost all their money on their first breakfast because they got the conversion rate wrong, belatedly realized they didn’t have an interpreter so they grabbed a teenage civilian… and yet still made it all the way to the Dutch castle where “Kaiser Bill” was living in exile!

9. Most of what happened between 1865 and 1917

10. The US beating Russia in the 1980 Winter Olympics ice hockey was not the gold medal game. The following game the US trailed Finland 2-1 entering the final period before rallying to win the gold 4-2.

11. There’s a LOT, but some of the more fun/less consequential ones (with a grain of salt; it’s been a bit since I did my history degree so details might be fuzzy):

    – I was recently on a walking tour of Boston and a group of locals had never heard of the Molasses Flood. A tank of molasses exploded in Boston’s North End, and the streets flooded with waist-deep molasses in places.

    – Boston was a massive queer hub in the late 1800s, to the point where queer men could have a “Boston marriage” (women had “Wellesley marriages”, after a women’s college near Boston)

    – the reason we have so many civil war era ghosts is because the American Civil War disrupted grieving processes around the country so drastically that we essentially made up stories about loved ones coming home

    – Blackbeard (the pirate) died in North Carolina.

    – following a severe illness in 1776, the Public Universal Friend claimed to have died and been sent back to earth as a genderless being to preach the Gospel. From that point on, the Friend refused to respond to any pronouns, dressed androgynously, and preached throughout the Northeast.

    Edit: additional fun facts as I remember things

    – I think the first application of microwave ovens was in airplanes (to heat things while flying). I couldn’t quickly fact check this, but I did learn that the second thing heated in a microwave was an egg. It exploded on a researcher.

    – Paul Revere (of horse riding fame) did the first post-Morten dental identification

12. Mexican Repatriation in the 1920s and 1930s.

13. Cambodia and the Jamaican Political Conflict.

14. The US had sent 2 Military Expeditions to Russia from 1918-1920, one called the North Russia campaign the other the Siberian campaign. The objectives being to assist the White Russians in fighting the Bolshevik Russians under Vladimir Lenin, and to help establish a new non-bolshevik government. The US never achieved any of their objectives and with the end of the Great War in Europe, there was very little support for the expeditions from the American public. Eventually the US withdrew all their troops from Russia in the year 1920. Approximately 400 Americans were killed between the 2 Expeditions.

    Its the only time in history that I can think off where the US and Soviet troops actively fought one another in major battles, and it was the only time Soviet History where US troops had “invaded” the mainland.

15. That for 75 years up until the early 1950s, the term “race riot” referred to white mobs that invaded black neighborhoods to kill and terrorize black people. Tulsa was but one of many such events.

16. The 1965 Immigration Reform Act. We learn about Ellis Island but we don’t really learn about this. Countless people in this country have no idea how modern immigration policy works, but much of it stems from this reform. This reform alongside the civil rights movement would go on to really shape American society for the next 50+ years.

17. The various specific wars against native tribes. We (at least in the mid-Atlantic US) are taught that wars happened, and that massacres happened, but aside from the Trail of Tears, we really are not taught much about the specifics of the American conquest of the continent, except maybe a little bit of a whitewashed version of local Native American history. Very few people know about the Seminole Wars, Pontiac’s Rebellion, King Phillips War, etc. Honestly, even I who see this problem only know fairly surface level stuff of only a few of these wars

18. Oddly, American history classes usually skip right over the colonial period. They cover Jamestown, the Pilgrims, then jump forward 140 years to the Revolution.

19. Tulsa Race Massacre

20. The French Revolution had a deep cultural influence in the US when it was occurring and some people would parade around guillotines during protests.

    There was a real possibility the country could have ended violently during Washington’s presidency. The revolutionary passions of the people weren’t waning after our victory. The French Revolution wasn’t helping.

21. I was shocked and ashamed that the first time I heard about the hanging of 38 Lakota men in 1862 by Lincoln (which was the largest mass hanging in USA history to this day I believe) at an art day camp in high school. I had lived my entire life in Minnesota and never heard about it in school.

    Also, the Tulsa Massacre (bombing of Black Wall Street), Sand Creek Massacre, really anything about the Korean War (we pretty much skipped from WWII to Vietnam), and I learned about Japanese internment camps during WWII in middle school from a library book – we never talked about it in class.

    Also, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco which was a smaller/lesser known LGBTQ riot that occurred a few years before Stonewall.

    There was also the Lavender Scare in which LGBTQ people and those suspected of being queer were labeled as security risks and communist sympathizers and expelled from government positions. Frank Kameny is an interesting figure to read about regarding that!

22. The Ni’ihau incident. Essential the US’s first victory in the Pacific campaign in WW2. And the event that led to Japaneese American interment camps in the US.

23. I knew nothing of the Fenian Raids until I started hanging out with Canadians. Most of the raids were just minor border skirmishes, but the first raid was a flat-out full-scale invasion of Ontario, and was largely successful for a brief time before the US government realized what was going on and put a stop to it.

24. The Battle of Blair Mountain

25. Vermont was a Republic before joining the union in 1791, with its own army, currency, and foreign policy.

    Vermont is still at war with Germany and declared war several months before Germany declared war of the US. Germany then, and now, failed to see the significance of this threat.

26. Acadian expulsions: despite Evangeline

    French and Indian war generally: that is technically pre-American but whatever.

    Spanish-American war: just aren’t many histories of it.

    History of the merchant marine

    Growth of the airlines: that was an exciting wild–west type of time with explorers looking for air routes all over the world, negotiation with governments and all sorts of things. As well as preparation for WWII (Pan Am was Air America before there was an Air America which is fascinating but not many know it).

27. Most of what actually happened in the War of 1812

28. COINTELPRO, the government surveillance and smear campaign during the civil Rights era.

29. The idea of secession is commonly associated with only the South during 1860-1861. But there had been serious discussions and threats of secession numerous times before that. New England came quite close to breaking away in the early 19th century. At one point New York City, just the city, was considering secession as well.

30. The sheer proportion of the native population that died in epidemics of new diseases. Some historians estimate that ***90%*** of the natives of Massachusetts had already ***before*** the Pilgrims arrived, just from the limited contact they had with European fishermen and traders as well as the diseases that arrived with the English and Spanish settlers further south.

31. In some places the entire story of Japanese internment is not spoken of. In California, where it is (usually) taught, there’s a big part of the story that still often goes untold: For decades before WW2, the most experienced and most productive farmers of fruits and vegetables were Japanese immigrants and their descendants. One of the main motivations for internment of Japanese Californians was as a pretext for a major land grab and hostile takeover (theft) of farms, nurseries, and distributorships.

32. [The Business Plot](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/coup-jan6-fdr-new-deal-business-plot-1276709/amp/). American oligarchs, including George HW Bush’s father, conspired to overthrow Roosevelt and install a fascist Dictatorship with Smedley Butler serving as their puppet. He led them to believe he was receptive to their plot just so he could gather evidence and he presented it to Congress which resulted in…zero arrests. Some have speculated that Roosevelt struck a deal with the conspirators allowing them to remain alive and not executed for sedition in exchange for their silence and promise to abandon their efforts. Roosevelt was keen to keep it hidden from the American public because he didn’t want them to know just how tenuous things were and how vulnerable to takeover or revolution the government was during the Great Depression.

33. In general, all of it.

34. AFTER winning the Spanish-American war, the US and Spain agreed to a Mock Battle in Manila to show Filipinos the US helped them win their own revolutionary war against the Spanish. In reality, Spain already lost and had agreed to cede the Philippines of a token sum.

35. The amount of American history most people actually know is tiny. It’s part of the reason crooked politicians can claim almost any falsehood about ‘our founding fathers’ and get away with it.

36. Eugenics movement preceding WWII at major universities.

37. I feel like I mention this in a comment once a month in this sub but growing up in Florida and attending public schools, I was taught from elementary school through high school that the American Civil War was “actually fought over states’ rights, not slavery.” It was framed as if it were a common misconception that the war was about slavery. Even with liberal parents who were from New York, I didn’t realize what an absolute crock that was until high school. Leave it to the southern US to continue to try and shed a positive light on the southern states fighting for their rights – TO OWN SLAVES.