Over the past few weekends i think my or should i say our knowledge of the world has significantly increased. this mainly occurred when one morning Margo, over breakfast, went through the succession of the british monarchy from memory- i was quite impressed! i think i was quite shocked at how unrelated some of them were! anyways i think her knowledge comes from lunch time wikipedia reading / trips to london when she first came over the pond...
we consequently decided to hit the national portrait gallery the next day where we leaned even more...i was quite shocked i genuinely found it very interesting! and learned quite a bit - enough to bring it up at work and test other peoples knowledge! anyways the museum also had a modern section which was not so good and actually quite random!
the museum also touched on american history this has been recently supported by a TV show that is running at the moment showing how the united states was born i guess- using modern day pictures of the current presidential candidates - its quite interesting! actually very interesting like in my complete lack of all things historical - in complete opposite to my brother! (i gave up history when i was 14 because the schools curriculum studied american history!) i didnt realise that the civil war was only like 60 years before WW1!
This was followed by a famous presenter in a different show traveling round the states in a london taxi! he is quite pompous! as you can imagine they find the weird and wonderful (they have the same show for the UK) anyways one of the things they showed was thanksgiving southern style with fried turkey (which scared me a little well a lot!) and their 'civil war game' which he described as "wonderful and only in america"!
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I didn't find history very interesting until I got old (as in now). I was too interested in the present. But now I realize (yes, I'm slow) that to understand the present, one has to know the past. But, since history doesn't exactly repeat itself (there always seems to be new factors), it doesn't always help!
Ah--civil war games. Kind of an odd name for rivalry games, come to think of it!
Mark is certainly making progress in his understanding of both English and American history!
The comment the guy made last night about the University of Alabama/Auburn game was quite interesting - basically saying the game was quintessentially American.
Both shows were really telling and interesting as they revealed some stereotypes that the English have about Americans. For example, the first show talked about war and they made a big point in saying that after lots of in depth research, they'd found that Americans don't actually look forward to war, but instead simply have a lot of respect for people in the military who do go to war. And I was like, they really think Americans just sit around with guns waiting for someone to shoot?? It seems I've got a lot of work to do!
all of my american historical knowledge comes from my brother while wondering round the sites of washington dc!
i do know the important events though i guess: WW1, WW2, the Romans, the Magna Carta and the date every British school kid has ingrained in their memory - 1066! the turning point between the dark and middle ages and the last time Britain was successfully attacked! this is easy to remember as the only time we have won the world cup was in 1966!
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