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I'm glad to hear you took it upon yourself to learn, kudos to you! And that you mention books, not (just) the internet as a source. Your library should have lots of great books on these subjects. I thought history was kind of boring in high school, but later I found out it's really fascinating (was it me/my youth, or the school that made it seem boring? :D).
One thing I definitely remember being drilled into us back then was that we must be constantly vigilant to protect our rights, or we'll lose them. How true that turned out to be! We're on the verge of losing so much right now. :(
Yeah it took be forever to start actually reading, I feel like only ever really reading when being forced to throughout all of school makes a lot of people wanna avoid it after they've graduated. Eventually I got sick of having only a wikipedia level depth of knowledge on cold war poverty in the U.S., so I bought Michael Harringtons "The Other America" and my library has grown exponentially since.
Almost definitely school lol, I feel like the whole learning through "Great history man did ____ on ____ day remember it for the test" really alienates people and makes it super hard to feel connected to or interested in any of it.
Maybe this was something else that changed or the deep south is just different, but I never really heard the importance of defending our rights as a kid (Unless that meant allegedly defending them from random groups in the Middle East).
Down here it was much more of a "Our country is the greatest and the free-est and everyone is jealous of us for our unexstinguishable freedoms" type of thing, and then most of us woke up in 2016 and realized that wasn't true.
That's great! I have to alternate non-fiction with fiction to "cleanse my palette", lol.
I'd forgotten how they would put more emphasis on memorizing dates than on why the events were important. Yes, it's definitely the school's fault. :)
I think there's always been that teaching to school kids that "we're the greatest and bestest country!" (gotta get that indoctrination well-embedded). When I was in school during the Cold war it was mostly about all the reasons why we were better than the Soviet Union (many of which either had unmentioned exceptions, or sadly no longer apply, especially post 9/11).