The complete history of America (abridged)

This past weekend I saw “Argo,” the new Ben Affleck movie based on the rescue of six U.S. diplomats from Tehran, Iran, during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis.

This is the part in which I tell you it’s a brilliant movie dealing with an amazing and poignant story, so everyone should see it.

Now is the part in which I tell you how it pissed me off.

Throughout the entire beginning of the movie, the only thing I could focus on was my basic knowledge of this event and the U.S.-Iranian tension that led to it.

Anything I did know about Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power, I knew because I had taught myself. I guess Model United Nations was good for something beyond the T-shirt.

The main question distracting me from the movie was, “why didn’t I learn any of this in school?”

I was required to learn U.S. history for almost all of grammar school, most of middle school and a year in high school.

We never made it to the issues of America’s past still affecting us today.

I could tell you anything you’d like to know about George Washington’s role in the French and Indian War, the mystery of Roanoke and the Boston Massacre. Yet if I didn’t have the curiosity myself, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you a single thing about Operation Desert Storm.

In all the years I had to study American history, we probably touched Vietnam once.
This seems pretty flawed to me.

I recognize that we should know about the birth of our nation, creation of the Constitution and everything else that created the country in which we live, but shouldn’t we also learn about the issues and problems that created the country where we live today?

Maybe it’s because we don’t want to show off too many mistakes.

We think American youth can handle only McCarthyism as the biggest mistake in American politics, so we don’t dare go past there.

Maybe we don’t want to dishearten the future of America by saying, “Look how many people hate you across the sea!”

Still, it’s necessary.

My apologies to Martin van Buren, but I say it’s time we start skimming more history that is no longer timely.

The American Revolution has had its time, but it doesn’t need to stay in the limelight for so long.

We should be at a point in which students research the Burr-Hamilton duel, not Clinton’s foreign policy, out of curiosity.

American history is going to get only more expansive. It’s time to start a real abridging process.

­— sjostrow@indiana.edu