>American History Esp. Early America
People get inundated with so much Pop History and Walmart Patriotism that they think they know everything about the period and Revolution but they actually don't know anything.

Any other topics? Why so? What's the biggest misconception about the period or event to you?

For me with like Early America it's warfare. Old fat boomers make people think the warfare was slow and pedantic - it wasn't. Rapid deployment, positioning, firing and charging was how you won battles. Standing in lines firing only happened during gridlock and they were infamously iconic, that's why we remember these fights.

>>17859166 (OP)
Mongols
It was one of the most misunderstood subjects in history and BY FAR

School managed to make ancient greece and rome boring, and I have spent the last 10 years of my adult life being fascinated with Greek and Roman warfare.

>>17859180
Care to provide an example of some of the biggest things people misunderstand? Genuinely want to know.

>>17859183
Once you read the Classics and old histories you realize just how much bullshit you've been fed. Opening Caesar's Conquests was a life-changer for me.

>>17859166 (OP)
pretty much anything relating to Mesoamerica, as Meso-anons will frequently point out.

>>17859166 (OP)
Can you give me any reading recommendations. British colonial/early American history is one I romanticize a lot as someone not of that region or racial group.

>>17859247
"Diary of a Revolutionary Soldier, or Private Yankee Doodle," by Joseph Plumb Martin.
"The American Crisis," by Thomas Paine
"Empire of Liberty," by Gordon S. Wood

>>17859245
I watched a thing once about the history of the Aztec Empire and it was fascinating.
That thing about the guy wearing a bride he was given as part of a treaty's skin was so fucking insane but it made lots of things about Mexicans make sense to me immediately.

>>17859261
tankiu fren

>>17859265
>doood los indios are le violent o algo
Cartels are overwhelmingly of Eurangutan/mestizo descent.

>>17859166 (OP)
>Americans writing about American history and being all American about it
>Placing tribal people on a pedestal
Those are two extremes of American history, making it an undesirable learn

>>17859273
I encourage you to read what actual pioneers like William Tappan Thompson and Osborne Russel had to say. They are honest in their assessment and tell you what's cool and what's absolutely inexcusable.

>>17859279
Sure, I'll give them a go. As long as I don't have to scroll down some authors page on Wikipedia until I hit "Controversy"

>>17859265
>it made lots of things about Mexicans make sense to me immediately.
desu, I think a lot of the retardation that goes on in Latin America can largely be blamed on Spanish colonial policy. The Encomienda system was a corrupt, dysfunctional piece of shit, and most of the methods used to try to rein it in only made it worse. All the Caudillo retardation and the efforts by poors to imitate it can be traced back to this.

>>17859247
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America

>>17859273

>>17859166 (OP)
World War 1. Most people's knowledge about the war is surface knowledge about the Western Front, "lions lead by donkeys and pointless offensives," believing that the Russians were fumbling throughout the entire war, and "Italy spent the entire war bashing its head against Isonzo lol," and occasionally something about the Armenian genocide or Hitler.

>>17859166 (OP)
This Walmart Patriotism you speak of has not been in fashion since Bush Jr.
Of course the early founding was violent that's not the point unless you're insinuating something by this very post.

>>17859619
The Comanche are interesting because they were the best at what they did, but because of that they're possibly not representative of your average native. The one question I want to ask is how willing and able were the natives, as a whole, to work or with or oppose the incoming immigrants?
It's a story about immigrants coming in and steamrolling tree huggers, or a story about the Comanche raiding for funsies and being impossible to negotiate with (not that the immigrants cared for negotiation), or everything in-between.

>>17859166 (OP)
For me its the overly simplified cause of the 30 Years War. While religious matters played a role, the myriad of political maneuvers and developments prior to the war were even more important. But because they complicated and occur in the 1590s and 1610s, not many know about them. As such the cause for the war gets simplified into a protestants vs catholics thing.

>>17859814
??
are you asking or claiming?

The Civil War probably because of Lost Causer memery which disregards the fact that the CSA was losing territory and the war since June 1861 and really never won any major battles outside Virginia.

>>17859166 (OP)
China post-Mao era because there's this kind of meme about how Deng Xiaoping was this genius who moved the country to market economics when in reality it was more out of desperation than anything because the CCP's power had gotten extremely weakened from the Cultural Revolution especially outside the major cities; China was almost lawless anarchy in the 70s-80s, the people had started doing market economics of their own free will and the CCP had no choice at that point but to just accept it because party cadres were literally being run out of rural villages or lynched.

>>17859166 (OP)
The Islamic conquests. Islam was, ultimately, a nativist reaction to the growing encroachment of Europeans on MENA since the Hellenistic era.

Thomas Jefferson was not le heckin based freedom man he was a slave rapist and dictator who destroyed civil speech in this country.

>>17859166 (OP)
The actual origins of the American Revolution

The Romans were the original globohomo, every region they conquered was paved over, the Latin language imposed, the Roman gods replaced local deities, Roman cultural norms imposed, etc.

>>17859166 (OP)
The Ottoman Empire for one.

>the ERE was a zombie state since 1204 and the European nations couldn't be bothered to rescue them from the Turks because there wasn't anything there worth saving
>most Ottoman subjects and most of the government/ruling class were Slavs, Greeks, and Armenians who willingly converted to Islam in contrast to Balkan/Armenian nationalist propaganda about being brutally enslaved for centuries

>>17859166 (OP)
A lot of fedora tipper memes about the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire.

>>17859270
>>17859245
This claim can be safely dismissed as this anon was given an opportunity to expand and simply spit out 4chan memes
>>17860258
Retarded
>>17859166 (OP)
Howard Zinn is a faggot and Matt Damon is a pretentious idiot

>>17859166 (OP)
Warren Harding was a misunderstood and unfairly maligned president simply because the Eastern media establishment didn't like him.

The Gilded Age is another memed and badly misunderstood part of American history that's been reduced to leftist "REEEE RICH PEOPLE" memes.

>>17859166 (OP)
The Wehrmacht wasn't actually the invincible super army some people think it was.

>>17859166 (OP)
>Why so?
Early American history has been mythologized into a folk religion, where the founding fathers take on characteristics of divine wise men and sages, and their actions guided by a higher, supernatural purpose. This began in the 19th century when American intellectuals wished to culturally divorce themselves from their European origins, and attempted to construct uniquely American founding myths and heroes.

It's a very interesting point of study, I recommend reading into it.

>>17860391
>Early American history has been mythologized into a folk religion, where the founding fathers take on characteristics of divine wise men and sages, and

until you realize >>17860258

That Woodrow Wilson was a Confederateboo and racist. He wasn't at all, although he grew up in the South and loved his home region he had lived in New Jersey most of his life and always considered the Civil War a tragedy that the South had no chance of winning and the CSA wasn't something that should be glorified.

I'm like a broken record on this board about this, but the Troubles.

Most people see it as either
>the epic IRA rose up against the evil brits
>the EVIL Irish waged a terror campaign against innocent Protestant
>the evil scheming BRITS tried to GENOCIDE the heckin Irish

People tend to massively oversimplify the conflict, and almost always completely misunderstand the way the various belligerents operate, as well as what their goals (both realistic and purely idealistic) were. I would also say that Irish people from the Republic of Ireland barely have a better grasp on it than Britain; both Britain and Ireland have run decades long propaganda campaigns to feed people "their" version of events-and both Ireland+Britain's version of events is wrong.

The Russian Revolutions of 1905-1917 and the subsequent civil war. You would be hard-pressed to find a topic that has been poisoned harder by people with clear historical agendas trying to mislabel, misrepresent, exaggerate, and downplay absolutely everything involved. Butthurt exiled whites/trotskyists/SR's on the one hand, 70 years of Communist revisionism on the other, foreign propaganda, Russian exceptionalism and mystical thinking, etc. all combine to make discussing the revolution impossible.

>>17859166 (OP)

JFK specifically his assassination. 99% of public discourse about it is either schizoposting about he how he was killed by Israelis/Big Oil/Mafia/CIA/Lizard people or just straight up regurgitating Camelot bullshit when the man was in reality

>mediocre at best as President
>a massive pill-popping degenerate
>the epitome of an establishment hack

>>17859731
>and "Italy spent the entire war bashing its head against Isonzo lol,"
The Bad Luigi is not actually a meme. He actually did the thing over and over again, and decimated the survivors he could get his hands on in-between.

>>17860290
>the Roman gods replaced local deities
More like supplanted. Most places outside of Italy have produced depictions of their local good in the greco-roman style.

>>17859190
>dude horse archers were OP
>dude gengis khan conquered everything
>dude gengis khan murdered 50 millions during his reign
>dude gengis khan had 3 billions children and was the dude with most descendants
>mongols ended the islamic Golden age
>mongols didnt attack you if you submitted

Etc...

>>17860530
Modern Democrats also want to bury the fact that he was a proponent of tax cuts and that Reagan got the idea from him.

>>17859166 (OP)
Turkic roots of Germanic people

>>17860530
While he was only a meh president a lot of the nostalgia for him is because that was an optimistic era with a strong economy and calm before the storm that was coming.

>>17859166 (OP)
Late Antiquity.
There seems to be a complete misunderstanding on how the Roman state actually functioned or the nature of the Germanic peoples within the Empire. Essentially coupling together the Early Empire but now Christian with some narrative about immigration. It doesn't help with people trying to project a modern political narrative which just doesn't make any sense whatsoever onto the period.

>>17860487
The Chinese civil war is almost as bad and has the same degree of both CCP revisionism and McCarthyites who think we "lost" China and that Chiang Kai-Shek was anything more than a corrupt incompetent caudillo

Gerald Ford was a better president than he's given credit for.

>>17859166 (OP)
Most of “ethiopain” history parroted by redditors et al is either made up, plagiarized/stolen, or wildly exaggerated. It’s a good litmus test to see if someone actually knows what they’re talking about outside western history.

>>17860602
they also needn't acknowledge that a lot of people in the State Department knew CKS was a loser and felt that nothing the communist could do was any worse than the situation in China for the preceding 30 years

Boris Yeltsin was also not actually le heckin based freedom man he was a corrupt totally incompetent caudillo.

>>17859166 (OP)
For some reason Calvin Coolidge is jerked off by libertarians despite the fact that he made the Federal Reserve permanent when its charter was originally supposed to expire in 1933.

>>17859247
>Can you give me any reading recommendations. British colonial/early American history is one I romanticize a lot as someone not of that region or racial group.
My ancestors were farming in Pennsylvania back then and probably only spoke German.

>>17859731
Since a lot of the British archives have been opened after reaching the 100 year declassification mark we can also see a lot of what was written about the war over the decades is bunk.

>>17859166 (OP)
Chicano revisionism about the Mexican War, a conflict even most Mexicans don't care about (they consider the war against the French occupation a bigger part of the national mythos)

>>17859166 (OP)
The 1950s which has been turned into (depending on political leanings)

>le heckin based wholesomearino paradise where everyone was a postcard trad family in a suburban home who owned a late model Buick and that this paradise was ruined by the Jews or something
>some kind of brutally oppressive Orwellian shit where women were beaten by their alcohol PTSD war vet husbands into making Jell-O Salads and blacks were beaten and run out of town by police every day

>>17860306
>This claim can be safely dismissed as this anon was given an opportunity to expand and simply spit out 4chan memes
ok anon, what do (you) know about Mesoamerica?

>>17860601
Could you recommend some entry level works on the period? I'm getting pretty tired of the Rome Total War "le Germans" narrative but I dont really know where to start. I know there was more to it than the massive invasion meme

>>17860667
Both and neither were actually true, any time someone generalizes a nation as big as the US with a decade as rapidly changing as the 1950s you know they're retard.

>>17860667
>some kind of brutally oppressive Orwellian shit
that was pretty true of Eastern Europe in the 50s tbqh

>>17859166 (OP)
the Polish "golden age" in 1500-1600 year when Poland at its peak was feudal shithole in which Germs and Jews actually ran economy and Poles themselves were just peasant whipped on noble estate.

>>17859197
Where would you recommend one start?

To answer OP, the American Civil War. I have NEVER seen such a misunderstood era, so damaged by pop history.

>>17860790
As anon said it's mostly because of Dixieboos who create the impression that the CSA wasn't losing the war from the opening months of it.

>>17860579
>dude horse archers were OP
In relation to this - stirrups.

All they do is increase the strategic mobility of cavalry as they let you ride way further before your calves will start killing you. Without being in horrifying pain, you are still capable of putting up a fight when you get to your destination.

That made it possible for the Mongols to just switch horses and cover even more distance, which is how they caught people with their pants down.

>>17859297
You are cringe as fuck sir. Not the guy you were talking to by the way.

The Grant the Butcher meme is one of the more egregious ACW memes that was also perpetuated by Dixieboos (as if Lee didn't sustain 20% or more casualties in most of ANV's battles)

>>17859814
Read, "Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America". Suffice to say, many tribes reacted to their European/African first contact violently but certainly not all.

>>17860816
The huge casualties sustained in May-June 1864 were due to Grant not being able to do the kind of blitzkrieg maneuvering he wanted. He was constrained among other things by the War Department's insistence that AOP be interposed between Lee and Washington D.C. at all times, and also AOP's command structure was infected with McClellan faggotry and the officers just couldn't do the kind of stuff Grant wanted them to do.

I mean, people underestimate just how bad the culture in AOP was. Officers and enlisted men who were fatally defeatist and let Lee live rent free in their heads. The arrival of Grant also chafed them because it was an implication that they were losers and needed a guy from the West to rescue them.

>>17860609
Ford was going to be hated simply for pardoning Nixon even though leaders of both parties knew it was the best thing for the country.

>>17860590
but yeah I agree the Kennedy years were good ones with a booming economy and a lot of optimism so it's easy to be nostalgic for the guy

>The Southern press's exhulations over Fredericksburg belied the fact that it was a Pyrrhic victory and Lee readily acknowledged it. "The battle meant nothing," he observed. "The enemy can easily replace all of his losses and will soon attack us again."[3]

>>17860656
their brains are so warped by Marxist propaganda that they can't even see that they're defending imperial land claims

>>17860583
retard

>>17859180
I just hate the cliche "you've never heard of the Khwarezmian Empire because of the Mongols" line that every surface level video about the Mongols says as though the Ghurid Empire is very well known by comparispn. If anything the Khwarezmian Empire is more well known because they were conquered by the Mongols.

>>17860804
Horse archers existed since 2000 years before the mongs
They were nothing new and their ennemies had horse archers/stirrups too

>>17860647
Yeah but Germans are obviously closer to Brits than Hispanics are. I assume your ancestors were also protestant, which counted for a lot in the early colonies.

>>17860306
No it's completely true and you fags just seethe because your meme about Indians being violent is retarded and easily disproven by overlaying maps of homicide rates with maps of native ancestry.

The Civil War. Discussion of which always results in the intrusion of either dixieboo brigades or reddit historians spamming 10 year old impact font sherman memes.

>>17861426
Here's the real redpills about the ACW:

>The CSA not only had no chance to win but they began losing territory within two months of Ft. Sumter being bombarded
>There were no major Confederate battlefield successes outside Virginia except for Chickamauga which was a Pyrrhic victory
>McClellan ultimately could not have carried Richmond in 1862 because his army was way too green to pull it off
>The battlefield victories in Virginia were delaying actions at best
>The horrible casualty rate of the Overland Campaign was not part of Grant's plan and happened for reasons outside his control
>Lee also sustained huge losses in almost every battle he fought other than Fredericksburg
>The March to the Sea was not at all the Genghis Khan rampage of destruction that Dixieboos claim it was
>Lincoln's Western background definitely affected the course of the war because he was always going to have a better personal chemistry with the Western generals than the AOP ones

>>17861456
Agreed with everything besides the first point. CSA victory would have been reliant on repeated Union losses lowering morale in the north and Lincoln losing re-election rather than victory through total war but it was a possibility.

>>17859166 (OP)
the middle ages
it's either "1000 years of barbarism, ignorance, obscurantism, superstition" or "chivalry, glory of Christianity, there was no dark age"
early middle ages in particular

>>17859166 (OP)
>For me with like Early America it's warfare. Old fat boomers make people think the warfare was slow and pedantic - it wasn't. Rapid deployment, positioning, firing and charging was how you won battles. Standing in lines firing only happened during gridlock and they were infamously iconic, that's why we remember these fights.
People think this because they are used to seeing boring documentaries as the only real depiction of this stuff. These documentaries only ever have like ~25 out of shape 40 something reenactor men standing in line awkwardly and firing so this is how it was like in their mind.

I really wish someone would make an American Revolution film, but give it a sort of operator kino treatment.

>>17859166 (OP)
WW2

I know, its babies first history topic, its the most normie friendly history topic, its the thing that every other video game/movie ect is based on, its what got you first interested in history, its the thing every boomer, "that kid", and entry level history buff is into.

But its amazing just how utterly clueless so many people are about it. Talk to most people and they will say it happened sometime in the 1950s, and it was when America fought against Hitler, the head of ugh...Germany or Russia, I cant remember. And he was like a communist or nazi or something.

>>17859166 (OP)
The Reconstruction. No one is completely honest about it, because they were all bad.

>>17861584
You're running into anti-intellectualism. This is where people have to act like they don't know things in order to fit in and not be seen as some kind of nerd who can be made fun of.

This is also why made Americans deliberately give wrong answers when asked simple geography questions in public with their friends. Often they know the answer but there are more incentives for them to pretend they don't know and zero incentives for getting it right.

>>17861597
they didn't want to say how much Republicans were using blacks as a weapon to establish total control over the South and then finally lost interest in the 1870s when they decided newly admitted Western states gave them enough electoral college strength that they didn't need the South anymore

>>17861601
>We’re not actually retarded we’re just pretending
Mutt cope has reached new levels.

>>17861554
They generally mention the massive colonization and urbanization drive that happened during the Middle Ages, but they really don't drive home the scale of it.

>>17860816
He really, really fucked up at Cold Harbor, which brings me to another thing people forget about the Civil War. Lee was mediocre as a commander. He could hold the Confederate Army together, actually a pretty significant feat, and certainly had huge balls. However, his real talent was engineering. He was very skilled as a military engineer, which was on full display at Cold Harbor.

>>17861634
Most ACW generals were like that because West Point taught engineering more than military skills. Officers were thus seldom skilled battlefield tacticians and we see in the war how many of them rarely knew how to do anything except massed frontal attacks on the enemy lines.

>>17860487
>"Boy, everyone in the Provisional Government sure was stupid, except me"

>>17861456
>The CSA not only had no chance to win but they began losing territory within two months of Ft. Sumter being bombarded

*laughs in Revolutionary War*
*laughs in Vietnam War*
*laughs in Soviet-Afghan and American-Afghan Wars*

I'm not saying it would have been easy or that it could have been won with a single battle alà Gettysburg/Antietam (if anything, the obsession with seeking a decisive battle arguably doomed the Southern cause) but the Confederacy absolutely could have won. It just would have come at an incredibly grievous cost.

Also something like the Trent Affair being mishandled and blowing up in the Union's face could have completely changed the dynamic of the war and made it a global conflict as opposed to a regional one (granted, that would be dependent on events out of the Confederacy's control).

>There were no major Confederate battlefield successes outside Virginia except for Chickamauga which was a Pyrrhic victory

Red River campaign was an absolute ROFLstomp

>35,000 Union troops
>6,000-10,000 Confederate troops (number of troops available varied widely)
>result - Confederate victory, lengthened the war by delaying the capture of Mobile, Alabama until 1865

>>17862315
>but the Confederacy absolutely could have won
NTA but any comparison of the US government's tenacity in a civil war to ensure its own territorial integrity versus the US/Soviet government's tenacity in propping up puppet governments in the Third World is facile.

>>17860301
>>the ERE was a zombie state since 1204
The byzantranny empire has always been a zombie state, it was never Rome despite christcuck lies.

>>17859616
That just proves that slaves would rather be British subjects than American subjects

>>17860804
Stirrups only really help if you are getting into two or three point positions, which would have been relevant for charges and certain maneuvers but not the default and still quite tiring even with stirrups.

>t. horse rider