{"id":75,"date":"2012-08-21T16:18:45","date_gmt":"2012-08-21T16:18:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thisplot.com\/TheNewThing\/?p=75"},"modified":"2012-08-22T16:19:35","modified_gmt":"2012-08-22T16:19:35","slug":"a-hole-in-my-us-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thisplot.com\/TheNewThing\/2012\/08\/21\/a-hole-in-my-us-education\/","title":{"rendered":"A Hole in my US education"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today only confirmed how much I don\u2019t know about US History.\u00a0 Unlike last week, when I was bouncing through World History exclaiming, \u201cThis is easy!\u201d, I\u2019m now faced with the reality that I really didn\u2019t study or pay attention in class.\u00a0 I remember clearly NOT liking US History in High School (or more correctly, the US History teacher), and then showing up only three times for my US History class in college (first day, mid-term, and final \u2013 Hey, I got a B in the class).\u00a0 I have not taken a US History class since.\u00a0 The only recent exposure to US history classes\/texts came last year when helping my daughter through 8th<\/sup> grade US History.<\/p>\n

Recently, my dislike of US History, or rather my clear preference for European\/World History has changed due to a few years of purposeful travel.\u00a0 For about 20 years, I spent most of my travel dollars on Europe, but starting in 2006, I started traveling domestically again.\u00a0 I had avoided US travel for so long because I had \u201cseen it\u201d growing up.\u00a0 As a kid, we lived in California, and my grandparents lived in New York so every year, we would drive across the country and back.\u00a0 I remember seeing lots of desert and lots of corn and nightly KOA campgrounds and not much else.\u00a0 To me, this was \u201cAmerica,\u201d and America was boring.\u00a0 After discovering Europe as a historical playground, I thought that maybe America might have something to offer as well\u2026 except that it was such a \u201cbaby\u201d nation, so there was little chance that anything interesting could have happened here that wasn\u2019t trumped in some way by the really old history of Europe.\u00a0 Then I went to Washington DC.<\/p>\n

At first, I went to DC because I didn\u2019t have enough money for Europe or Peru.\u00a0 I was really stressed at work and travel relieves that stress so my loving wife allowed me to go someplace.\u00a0 I thought I had $5K in my travel budget, but I only had $500.\u00a0 My brother lived in DC, so I went there and stayed at his house.\u00a0 Washington DC was fantastic!\u00a0 After six days in the city, I had not run out of things to see or do; and it was all so wonderfully historic.\u00a0 It really turned me around.\u00a0 When I got home, Barb and I started visiting California Missions (later that year, I went to St. Louis, and as a family, we also went to NYC \u2013 all were fantastic and historic).\u00a0 We then went to Hearst Castle, a place I had absolutely loved as a kid.\u00a0 It was magnificent!\u00a0 In 2008, we visited DC again, along with Philadelphia and Mt. Vernon (Washington\u2019s home); this time as a family.\u00a0 More wonderful history!\u00a0 That same year, during a family reunion, we went to Gettysburg, Harper\u2019s Ferry and Antietam and learned about Civil War history.\u00a0 That was so cool that last year, we took a trip to Mystic, Plymouth, Quincy (John Adam\u2019s\u2019 house) and Boston.\u00a0 I began to understand how these different cities interrelated during colonial times.\u00a0 This year, we started in Florida and went up the coast just to see some of the Southern historic sites (St. Augustine, Charleston, Jamestown\/Williamsburg & Monticello {Jefferson\u2019s home}).\u00a0 With all this recent travel, I feel well-prepared for early US history, but not for anything past the Civil war.\u00a0 I have traveled in Europe and Asia, so I get WWII, Korea and Vietnam; the big hole in my historical knowledge is from the Civil War to WWII.\u00a0 This is the period I\u2019m studying for the next couple of days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today only confirmed how much I don\u2019t know about US History.\u00a0 Unlike last week, when I was bouncing through World History exclaiming, \u201cThis is easy!\u201d, I\u2019m now faced with the reality that I really didn\u2019t study or pay attention in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisplot.com\/TheNewThing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisplot.com\/TheNewThing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisplot.com\/TheNewThing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisplot.com\/TheNewThing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisplot.com\/TheNewThing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisplot.com\/TheNewThing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisplot.com\/TheNewThing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions\/76"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisplot.com\/TheNewThing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisplot.com\/TheNewThing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisplot.com\/TheNewThing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}