General American History Thread - Finding new things to be ashamed about

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > General American History Thread - Finding new things to be ashamed about

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

100YrsofAttitude posted:

Only because of our own imperial expansion. If you play baseball outside of the States at some point you were occupied by American soldiers. It's how we exported it.

I'm pretty sure baseball was first exported to and established itself in Japan during the Meiji period, well before WWII and US occupation. There was a brief flutter of interest in Qing China, too, but that was mostly just during the Self-Strengthening Movement period.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2013 13:13

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 14:10

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Korak posted:

Why did absolutely no large political party rise to fight oil/steel/etc barons in the late 19th and early 20th century?

You mean, parties like the Greenbacks, Populists, Socialists and Progressives (three of them)? The thing with them was that as soon as they started sweeping national elections, either the Democrats or Republicans would adopt some of the more moderate planks of whatever third party was popular at the time, pass some token bills and subvert the third party's support and momentum. Sometimes the third party would get sucked into one of the two parties (William Jennings Bryan, mentioned above, was a Populist who ended up a Democrat in Woodrow Wilson's administration) or become the core of the next third party movement.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2013 20:36

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

When it comes to Native American facts running contrary to stereotypes, I still remember being startled when I first read about early Cherokee willingness to adapt to Southern society, going so far as to become plantation owners and slaveholders themselves. Hollywood told me that Indians were simple people, pure of heart, who would never stoop to such lows as slavery. :qq:

It's also worth brining up Sequoyah. I know little about him beyond what Wikipedia covers, but the dude invented his own alphabet for the Cherokee and that thing is still in use today, and that's cool.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2013 03:44

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Ardennes posted:

Why wouldn't they? Stalin had trusted Roosevelt to a great extend, a reason that the war-time alliance succeeded so well but obviously Truman didn't have the same relationship and obviously the right in the US had become much more vocal at the end of the war. In addition, like I said, there was already bad blood between the Soviets and the US that stretched back to the Civil War.

I know that there was at least some Soviet espionage within the US and UK during WWII, what with Manhattan Project leaks and so forth-- what wartime American and British spies were there in the USSR during the same period? I assume there's some, because if it was just the USSR spying on the western Allies without any reciprocation that wouldn't lend much to the idea of Stalin being a trusting sort of fellow during WWII.

# ¿ Oct 29, 2013 19:50

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Nessus posted:

Well, there's trust and then there's trust. I don't think the idea that Stalin was spying on all the bourgeois states and the idea that Stalin had a positive regard for Roosevelt compared to (say) Churchill, Truman etc. are mutually incompatible.

Aside from the "did Stalin actually trust Roosevelt" thing, I am legit interested in American & British espionage inside the USSR. There's stuff out there about Communist agents working in federal agencies in the 1940s and '50s and a bit about Soviet defectors, but surely there must've been active American agents inside the Soviet Union at some point, right?

Ofaloaf fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Oct 29, 2013

# ¿ Oct 29, 2013 20:10

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

temple posted:

I never knew there was so much American history in Russia!

Raskolnikov38 posted:

Really this should just be called the history thread. Trying to limit the scope of a thread to just american history is going to be hard because history is intertwined by nature.

There really just ought to be a history forum, because this stuff just seeps out of a lot of threads and there's history-oriented threads in D&D, A/T, GBS, PYF, the Firing Range and probably others.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2013 00:13

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

R. Mute posted:

America just isn't interesting, sorry.

Pfah! If you want some fun American history, read up on the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. In St. Louis, the railroad workers' strike quickly snowballed into a general strike covering all industries, major components of the city government either fled or simply holed themselves up and waited, and soon civic leaders were approaching the strikers' organizing committee and asking them to let some industries run on a limited basis, directed by the committee. For about a week (until Federal troops finally arrived in force) St. Louis was a syndicalist commune.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2013 01:10

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Texas never played a big role in because they were on the far side of the Mississippi and even if Vicksburg didn't fall until 1863, Union gunboats made it tricky to maintain solid, steady connections with the western side of the Trans-Mississippi.

Ofaloaf fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Nov 2, 2013

# ¿ Nov 2, 2013 19:31

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

EvanSchenck posted:

In real life, Spain fought multiple wars to maintain control of Cuba, why would they sell it?

It's been a little bit since I last read up on the Spanish-American War, but iirc Spain considered selling Cuba a couple times towards the end of their time there, but nobody followed through on the offers once they found out Spain wanted any potential buyer to also assume all Cuba-associated debts Spain racked up. That was even an issue with post-war negotiations with the US, I think.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2013 23:29

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Got to be the Populists. Primarily rural and agrarian, anti-Big Business, very fond of economic regulation, not keen on the Gold Standard.

If you can track down a copy, The One-Gallused Rebellion is a nicely-focused, if somewhat old, look at the growth and decline of Populism primarily in the state of Alabama. Part of their success in the South was that they were the second party, the Republican Party machines of states such as Alabama and Georgia being next to nothing. There was an oppositional vacuum present, and the Populists did a good job of (briefly) taking on that role.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2013 05:32

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Mans posted:

Now please, tell a European newbie about mass transportation. How true is the conspiracy theory about General Motors discarding entire buses into landfills so they could sell cars? Was mass transportation trully dismantled in the U.S. or did it exist in a better shape at all?

That was true for a select few companies, but there were plenty mass transit companies that were just horribly managed and fell into bankruptcy on their own without having a conspiracy push them over the edge. The thing was that when the companies failed, the state didn't intervene (for various reasons) so instead of having failing private ventures in public services being turned into government operations, they just ceased to be.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 02:08

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Paper With Lines posted:

Doesn't it usually seem sort of weird for the video format? It is actors talking and pictures of the subject material. I could read it faster than it takes to watch it.

It's a solid way to do that sort of thing, and it's been around for at least a half-century now. The Great War was done in that style back in 1964 and it's still a brilliant documentary series for anyone interested in WWI.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2013 23:15

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Some Guy TT posted:

Will someone please explain why is 1421 so awful? I haven't read it, it's just kind of annoying the way everyone's referring to it as an abstract concept without saying what's the problem is.

Ming China discovered America in the early 15th century! See, Zheng He circumnavigated the globe at the head of a huge fleet of ships and left a bunch of artifacts in America such as these really worn stones and

# ¿ Feb 8, 2014 03:34

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Miltank posted:

Much of my family immigrated to the US to farm in the very late 1800s to the very early 1900s so I would assume there was still free or inexpensive land at that time.

My Great-Grandma and that whole side of the family came to the US because they were Armenian and they were from the Ottoman Empire and regardless of how you want to exactly describe the situation it was basically most unpleasant there. I don't think they really gave a drat either way about free land, they just wanted to get out of there.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2014 11:12

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

PittTheElder posted:

Surely you don't mean your uncle was involved in the Whiskey Rebellion that took place in 1791? Either there's some greats missing there, or you're 150 years old.

There could be some dilly-dallying involved on the part of the father. John Tyler's still got living grandchildren, for instance.

Still probably has to have a great- or two involved for it to make sense, but yeah.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2014 02:40

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Negative Entropy posted:

Every US President is problematic in one way or another. Even Abraham Lincoln wiped his rear end with habeas corpus and had a problematic relationship with Native Americans. FDR vacillated on civil rights.

I recall hearing a talk which casually stated that among Indians, Abraham Lincoln is considered one of the worst US Presidents and Richard Nixon is actually one of the best. I have little to no knowledge of various presidents' Indian policies, so I'm curious if that's true or not.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2014 11:37

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

ToxicSlurpee posted:

A lot of those dictators were installed by the U.S.

Juuuuuuust saying.

There weren't any CIA death squads running across Latin America when Bolivar proclaimed himself dictator, though. There were coups and revolutions in the 19th century too, well before we really got into the imperialist spirit of things.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2014 15:22

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Jerry Manderbilt posted:

I like how the first seven CSA states to secede were just so sure that not exporting cotton would bring Britain to its knees and force them to aid the rebels, but instead the British just began growing cotton in India and Egypt instead

The (partial) revival of cotton after the war is rather saddening. In Alabama at least, farmers returning in 1865 saw that cotton prices were high (due in part to the Confederacy's well-thought-out scheme) and tried planting as much cotton as they could in 1866, oftentimes using liens to cover the cost of planting. The price of cotton plummeted as the last ripples of the war faded away, however, and many farmers found they were in debt or did not profit nearly as much as they had gambled. Even so, cotton still sold for more than cereal crops and it was what many merchants were willing to offer loans for, so the farmers planted cotton again in 1867, then in '68, '69, and so forth, each year trying to plant more to bring in a bit of profit for themselves and instead just contributing to overproduction, the continued depression of cotton prices in the South, and their continued reliance on crop liens to make do.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2014 21:35

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Rogue0071 posted:

While this might be expected for a commander, you can see the influence of black soldiers on Northern white society elsewhere - for example, these cartoons by (otherwise often racist) Thomas Nast:

"Franchise - and not this man?"

""We regard the Reconstruction Acts (so called) of Congress as usurpations, and unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void." - Democratic Platform"

Given time, this sort of attitude faded. Here's Thomas Nast by 1874:

# ¿ Apr 8, 2014 19:34

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 14:10

Ofaloaf: Feb 15, 2013

Patrick Spens posted:

But Guns of the South has a Robert E. Lee led Confederacy banning slavery about a year after the war ends, because it turns out the war really was about states rights. [/I]

I just read that mostly as a general reaction to time-traveling Afrikaner nationalists being raging assholes and shooting Robert E. Lee's wife.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2014 21:38

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