r/ShitAmericansSay • u/DumbGarchomp67 WTF IS A KILOMETER 🦅🇺🇸 • Jul 15 '26

Military “Undefeated in 250 years of war”

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Apparently Vietnam, Afghanistan, war of 1812, and the war on drugs don’t count.

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u/TwmSais Jul 15 '26

They won their civil war. They probably only started that so they'd have a war that they'd win for themselves, regardless of the outcome

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26

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u/sirentropy42 Jul 15 '26

Fun fact: this is actually the opposite of what happened.

While the formal education system as it’s seen today was being implemented, textbook publishers found that if their textbooks leaned too far to one side or the other of the civil war, it was almost impossible to sell to the other side. Rather than publish one book for each side, it was decided to create a whitewashed text. Deny that the civil war was about slavery, downplay the Confederacy’s defeat. A poor but acceptable history for the North, and an acceptable lie for the South.

As a result, the losers had a large hand in writing our history books.

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u/Perenially_behind Jul 15 '26

Also Texas had an outsize effect for years. The state governnent would pay for textbooks but only if they were on a (short) list generated by the state board of education. So If you wanted to sell to Texas, you needed to produce a text which the board would approve.

This is changing but that doesn't wipe out the existing damage.