America - Where's Your History?

Anyone that goes through the American education system gets a good dose of history along the way. We have our heroes, our villains, our victories, our humiliations…in short, everything a history should

have. If we so choose, we can get classes dealing with history outside of the States, most commonly European. There we learn about kings, emperors, and all sorts of other things that seem quite foreign to most of us.

It wasn’t until I got to Spain and began taking History of Modern Spain that I realized just how much history European countries have in comparison to us, and just how odd some of this history may seem. Hundreds of years of kings, nobles, privileges, marital diplomacy, etc. is just not something one gets used to overnight.

But what I find even more interesting are the manifestations of such history even today. For example, the royal family is always in the spotlight, the recent birth of the grandchild of the king was in the news for weeks, and from what I hear “diplomatic” marriages still take place to some extent. From time to time, when I ask who someone is on TV, my roommate responds that it is someone with tons of money due to his/her family’s history, as in a member of the noble class of some form or another.

The cultural ramifications of hundreds of years of tradition also are quite present. All sorts of parties, celebrations, and rituals (in a very loose sense of the word) take place all the time. This is something we just don’t experience in the States, and something that is generally a bit difficult to understand at first.

Faced with all of this history and tradition, I can’t help but wonder if we are missing out on something in the States. Whether this is a positive or negative aspect I can’t say for sure. However I definitely have a new-found perspective on the true youth of America as a nation.