History way back at school

Well something that has interested me and always will has been history. Wont say i am a history buff but i do like the subject.

Saw this video and it took me back to school days when we got taught about the French revolution. I had what has to be one of the best teachers ever for this specific year of high-school history. We were all required to make some or other props related to the period such as making a guillotine or bringing in our own cannons.

Seeing this guys video on his Halloween guillotine took me back to the high school lessons .


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTN-WY0X5Jw


So i am wondering when you guys both Canadians and Americans (given i come from SA) were at school did you learnt about this period of European history?

I ended up making an model (using my Dads shop) of an entire French village and painting all the buildings surrounding the square where i put a working miniature of the guillotine.

Then we took a piece of stove pipe. sized to fit the local pop cans, and bought some big bang crackers and can you believe we were on the second story of the school building shooting pop cans out of the windows with the teachers permission. That is until the principle stopped liking them landing in the school fishpond and came up to have a word about it.

Man that teacher made it so interactive, one got totally caught up in the period. We even built a barricade in the isle of the classroom between the desks with our backpacks as sandbags and obstacles. Seriously fun times.

We certainly learned about the French Revolution, and the entire revolutionary period in Europe as it came together. We also learned Canadian History, British History, but American History got short shrift. I sometimes think that may have been because the Disney channel was pouring its version of American History down our throats every Sunday evening. On Jeopardy! I always flub the American History questions. We all knew about Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone.

IIRC, we got British History in grade 9, then twentieth century history, classical history, and late eighteenth to mid nineteenth history, mostly European.

Our only reference to the French Revolution was reading "Tale of Two Cities" in high school. We barely covered the U.S. Civil War. The Spanish-American War, WWI, WWII, and Korea were pretty much ignored as 'too current to ne history,' and the Vietnam war was just beginning then.

Canadian history and current events were ignored (and mostly still are, BTW), as were Africa and South America.

We were pretty much an isolationist society, education-wise.

I went to a catholic High school and we had one year of "World history". We also had a year of US History. I took more world History in College and became a bit of a History buff. I really enjoy reading about English and European history from the Roman conquest of Briton through the Norman Conquest.

Texas schools were more into Texas history... we had our little comic book text book and learned all about Santa Ana and the Alamo.... don't remember so much about World History... I've read up on it some since school.

I graduated from a small Texas high school in 1969. Our history teachers were all coaches. Unfortunately, they taught history about the way they coached an we were horrible. We had one year of American History, one year of World History, and one year of Texas history. The emphasis was definitely on TX history. Everything else was basically war to war. Yes we learned about the French Revolution though.

My dad was an amateur historian and story teller. Everywhere we went, he had a story about something that had happened there. I got my love of history from him. Took history electives in college when I could. When I lived in Montana, I was introduced to Lewis & Clark (1 page in my US history book in high school). Now I have a L&C library and have taught and written about the expedition for 20 years.