Remember the Days?

So my sister has started school again, which of course means she was scrambling at the last minute to finish a history project, which of course means her parents decide to ask me to help her. Of course all of you who actually know me already know why this is funny: I don’t know diddly-squat about anything that doesn’t involve food or football. But history is very important. Imagine how much better our lives would be if our world leaders paid attention in history classes instead of carving “Dick was here” into the back of other student’s heads. Because we’re always being told that if we study history, we will avoid those same mistakes today. This certainly makes sense, seeing as history is filled with wars, discrimination, bad wigs and other things we supposedly want to avoid today.

With all that said, I don’t know anything about history. The last US history class I had was my junior year with Mr. Backhaus. Now Mr. Backhaus was the type of teacher who clearly was very involved in certain parts of American history, mainly the parts where recreational drug use was widely practiced. He would say half of a sentence, make this strange sound and just kind of stare off into the distance. But Mr. Backhaus is not the only reason I know nothing about history. First off, history is very long and monotonous. Oh sure, history buffs can go on and on about things like foreign policy, but the only things I used to remember were funny sounding things like the “Hawley Smoot Tariff,” (and I’m not even sure what that is; it sounds like what someone from Utah would say if they were cut off in traffic). As it turns out, a lot of people participated in history, and most of them have the most ridiculous names with way too many intitials and nicknames in quotation marks, like Howard I. O. U. “Cookie Monster” Googleberry IV Jr.

Another difficult thing about learning history is that most of the people who experienced history first-hand are dead, and thus they don’t make the greatest teachers (but they probably tell better jokes than my professors). So we have to rely on history books for all of our information. Luckily for us, in a genuine effort to connect with young people and be “hip,” history books were written to be very boring. They cover wars (the only cool parts of history) in a page but they can spend entire chapters mumbling on about “culture,” (which apparently was everywhere in history). Also, have you ever noticed that at the end and beginning of chapters history books tend to start using a lot of metaphors to describe things? Like a typical end to a chapter will read something like: “But the tornado of immigration had just begun to stir up the dust clouds of discontent as the storm front of ignorance summoned the rainstorm of violence which was about the fall on the small island of peace and kill all the llamas of tranquility.”

I have always gone under the assumption that history starts with the formation of the US. Sure, stuff happens before then but none of it is interesting. There was a big bang, Littlefoot finally reached puberty and was hit by an asteroid, cavemen invented the first wheel and a day later was arrested for the first DUI, the Romans killed the Greeks for inventing math, and nobody had heard of Twitter. As you can see there’s nothing much to talk about, so let’s just start with us. It all started when the colonists decided they didn’t want to pay taxes and revolted. Back then it was patriotic but today we call it felony tax evasion, so don’t go thinking you can just declare your sofa its own country and stop paying taxes. Anyway, this started the Revolutionary War, pitting the English “lobster backs” (so called because their uniforms were similar to lobsters in that they had tails and eight legs) and the “minute men” (so called because that’s how long it took for them to load their stupid guns, during which time the British would walk right up to them and beat them to death with their claws). By the way, what kind of men would have taken pride in being called “minute men?”

As you can probably tell by the fact that we call ourselves Americans and not pompous snobs, we won the Revolutionary War on a last second touchdown run by Paul Revere in spite of the fact that the French were on our side. (The French losing is a common theme in history; a dozen kindergarteners and a group of circus chimps armed with bubble wrap could conquer France in a day). But now that we had our own country we needed to write a constitution, so we turned to Thomas Jefferson. He was actually given three weeks to write it, but he procrastinated and played Halo instead, which meant he had to do it all on the last night. This is probably why our Constitution has a lot of grammatical errors in it, like “we the people” and leaves out a lot of people, like blacks and women. He sort of made up for it by making the Louisiana Purchase from France, but of course when Lewis and Clark went to go check what they had bought all they found was dirt and bears. They tried to return it but they lost the receipt and France had blown all of the money at the Vegas slots anyway.

After that my recollection of history gets a bit blurry, which is kind of funny considering I can tell you who the MVP of the first Superbowl was (it was not Tom Brady as it turns out). Tons of Americans died in the Civil War, and if you asked them today most of them would say they should have just let the South secede. It's not like we'd miss them. I’m pretty sure there were some big wars in which the Germans tried to take over the world and France got raided like some kind of Detroit crack house and the US eventually got involved and saved the day by nuking half of Japan. There was the Iran-Contra Scandal, which is the kind of thing that happens when the US chain of command does not include the president. We invented the lightbulb (“hey we can stay up past 6!”), made advancements in labor rights (sweatshops began honoring employee of the month), and of course women’s suffrage (women now get to help choose which rich white men rule the world).

Anyway, I told my sister to remember these simple rules when you take history tests. First, you won’t remember any of the dates, so pick a date you can remember (your birthday for instance) and just use that date for every answer (unless of course the date is obvious, like “In what year did the War of 1812 begin?”). Second, look in the question for clues. For instance, “On which trail to Oregon did hundreds of settlers embark on in the hopes of becoming coyote food?” (Answer: The Mason-Dixon Line). And last but not least: it’s General Custer, not General Custard.