What are some forgotten eras from american history?

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  4. That period where we fought pirates in the Mediterranean alongside Sweden. Barbary Wars if anyone is interested.

  6. Its pre-United States, but I think most people have no idea how prevalent, loved, and influential pirates—>privateers—>smugglers were in the 17th and 18th century and how their flouting of the law inspired rebellion. How directly connected and mainstream these men, often sponsored by wealthy politicians and businessmen, were.

  8. The religious revival in the US after WW2

    The Spanish control of Florida

    American settlers in the middle of America during the 1700s to 1800s

    The civil war in the mid west

    Pre-Civil war politics regarding the slave trade

    US national building in Japan and South Korea post Korean War

    2000s America during is transition from paper to digitization especially in the public sector/ gov departments

    The American Protestant-Catholic divide and it’s impacts on public & private education

    The rise of televangelist

    The southern democrats block post civil war

    Reconstruction and its long term impacts

    The consolidation of the American defense industry during the 2000s

  9. The way history is taught, where history is like a circus tent and wars are the posts, means we gloss over any time there isn’t about to be a war again. And tbh a lot of the interesting stuff ends up as “interwar periods”. (The whole period between Iraq withdrawing from Kuwait and 9/11 will probably be “interwar” in a textbook someday.)

  10. 1812 gets shafted, really. Between the Battle of Baltimore and the Star-Spangled Banner, the USS Constitution, and the Battle of New Orleans, we really treat it like the forgotten middle child of pre-20th century US history.

    The Mexican American War. It set up SOOOO much with the Civil War, especially key personalities. Also a forgotten middle child.

    The Gilded Age kinda gets glossed over. We go “uh, trains or something, some stuff hither and thither, oh hey Big Daddy Teddy! … something something, WWI?”

    On that note, WWI. It was such a defining moment where the US really came into its own as its own military and economic power. But people tend to treat WWI as a prequel to WWII rather than treat WWII as a sequel to WWI. Pershing built up the AEF from scratch and said “I don’t have to listen to you Europoors, I’m a goddamn American!” And proceeds to slam fire his way through Meuse-Argonne. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but it’s an interesting time period.

  11. WWI just simply due to not being as big a deal as WWII to most people. Also the Korean War which is also known as the “Forgotten” or “Unknown” war being framed between WWII and Vietnam. People think about the Koreas but rarely the actual war itself. There’s also a large period in the late 1800s where all sorts of wacky stuff was going on.

  13. Here’s my list of random things in US history

    1. Toledo War
    2. Minnesota Right Wing Coup of 1917
    3. Fusionism in North Carolina
    4. Bourbon Democrats
    5. Evelyn Nesbit
    6. Emma Goldman
    7. Battle of Blair Mountain
    8. Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871

  16. The 1840s is a much more important era than people give it credit for. Its very much where the civil war lines were drawn, as new states became either slave or free. Its also when transcendentalism and became popular, as was the push for women to vote. And then of course, the Mexican American war, which basically doubled our territory in a wanton act of imperialism.

  17. The hunt for guano

    Edit: it really kicked off the US’ imperial ambitions outside of the continent. To this day the US still claims a bunch of tiny islands in the pacific that used to be guano deposits.

  18. 1900 to 1920 was a unique time in America. Telephones were becoming widely used, cities were getting electricity, moving pictures were starting up, experiments were ongoing on the future radio, and a couple of brothers had a dream to fly. Factories were flourishing, small businesses were taking off, and incomes were rising across the board. Why even morphine heroin cocaine opium and tinctures of marijuana were being sold over the counter in American pharmacies. Then WW1 and the 1918 flu had to screw things up

  19. Reconstruction era. I think it often gets glossed over. Entire towns were sacked, elected officials killed or run out of office such as the Wilmington insurrection of 1898. As one historian put it, “The civil war didn’t end in 1865, whites just decided to stop killing each other.”

  20. I feel like the historical moral panics and great awakenings aren’t talked about enough.

    I can’t even remember when or why they happened, if that’s even a fully agreed-upon fact – I was taught that way in school – but feel like it’s super important to remember that at some various points during our history, people collectively freaked out about something then we all realized it was ridiculous.

    Really puts times you live thru more in the context of fashion trends than what i feel like is normally thought of as a steady, consistent march toward progress

  21. The Quasi War with France.

    The fact that we owned the Philippines nearly a half century and fought something like 3 civil wars there. Having them as a territory meant Asians were probably the largest minority at the time.

  24. The great railroading age of the 19th-20th century. Such a shame we didn’t keep our passenger rail service intact. Would’ve been lovely to be able to hop on a train and be able to visit my grandmama without having to worry about driving with my car every time I do it.

  25. As a former resident of Florida I think people don’t talk a lot about the pre-Disney era of Florida tourism. Riverboat cruises went down the St. Johns River and a lot of riverside towns that are now impoverished and run-down were the sites of fabulous hotels and had quite a bit of money going through them. America’s rich and famous would book rooms at Henry Flagler’s hotel in St. Augustine (now a college) and stay the entire winter season. A railroad was run all the way to Key West, and tourists rode it to fishing camps in the Keys until the Labor Day Hurricane in 1935 destroyed it.

  26. It’s not so much a forgotten period, but the history of “football” in our relationship with the rest of the world is really fun and exciting, with a lot of events or moments that either contradict or render modern “debates” about “football” as hypocritical, or just straight-up misinformed.

  27. The [“Great Awakening”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Awakening) is a bit glossed over in US history.

    It’s a topic that gets glossed-over in American history, partly because it’s so gosh dang complex. The (ridiculously) oversimplified version is that it was a religious revival movement that can reasonably called the initial spark of the American Civil War, as well as modern evangelical Christianity.

    And that’s just the start. Things get more bonkers from there.

    Pretty much anyone but the most devoted historical scholars just say “there was this thing called the Great Awakening. Now let’s move on.”

    Hell, I’ve literally got a history degree and the complexities of the Great Awakening make my brain want to bleed.

  30. People forget just how *insane* the domestic political climate was during and immediately after WW1 in the US.

    * The time is often called the “nadir of American race relations” for good reason. The Ku Klux Klan had reformed and achieved nationwide success on a platform of nativism, white supremacy, and anti-Catholicism. 1919-1921 was marked by “race riots” that were more akin to low-key race wars, often resulting in dozens of deaths.

    * Leftist agitation reached a fever pitch, emboldened by the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia. Numerous labor unions went on strike across the nation, including New York harbor men, Boston police officers, and the entire city of Seattle. There was a series of anarchist bombings around the country, including a car bomb on Wall Street that killed 40 people; it was the deadliest act of ideological terrorism in American history until the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

    * In turn, this led to widespread government crackdowns, typically known as the First Red Scare. Free speech was curtailed thanks to the controversial Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918, which were upheld by the Supreme Court cases *Scheck v. United States* and *Abrams v. United States*. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer oversaw the namesake “Palmer Raids,” leading to over 6,000 arrests of anarchists and communists, and over 500 foreign socialists being deported.

    * The temperance movement got enough support nationwide to successfully push through the 18th amendment, promising to outlaw the manufacture and consumption of alcohol.

    * President Woodrow Wilson was left partially paralyzed by a stroke, leading to fierce debates in Congress about his physical and mental fitness. Despite this, he wanted to run for a third term until he was stonewalled by the DNC.

    * Wilson’s successor, Warren G. Harding, suddenly died 2 years into his first term of a heart attack. It came out several months later that his administration was embroiled in several massive corruption scandals involving members of his cabinet.

  32. 1820-1850 and 1880-1905 don’t get enough love.

    In researching the 1920s, I learned there was an experimental phase with automobiles in the late 1800s call “The Brass Car era”. I would have loved to learn about that in school.

  34. Probably our invasion of Mexico. Even in AP American History which I took in high school. Not much talk about that war with Mexico.

  37. I think the Indian Wars are well known but nobody talks about the Reservation Era, and when people do talk about it they usually get it wrong.

    It was a horrible horrible time for indigenous Americans. They forced us into POW camps that would become our reservations. Our people suffered from hunger and disease directly caused by the US army who slaughtered our peoples primary food sources and passed on diseases which were deadly to us and decimated our populations. This also lead into the Residential School era that broke families apart and erased our languages.

    The Indian Wars were going on during this time and that’s usually what gets attention when talking about Westward expansion and Native Americans.

  39. The Spanish colonization of Florida is largely overlooked for the French and British colonies. They were the first European land claim and the flag today is a version of the Cross of Burgundy.

  40. I like talking about two people for this topic: Billy Sunday and Lincoln Beachey. The former was a baseball player turned evangelist, the latter was an early aviator. They both peaked just before radio came on the scene, which was this time in American history when the nation was dense enough to attract big crowds but there wasn’t the kind of mass media to keep them from gathering.

    Sunday would travel from city to city, and people would erect massive tabernacles out of wood for his revivals. Like imagine a bunch of New Yorkers just coming together and constructing an 18,000 seat building just so they could host the guy.

    Apparently Beachey died doing a loop with 250,000 people watching in San Francisco.

    Just massive figures, they would have been household names, and no one knows who they are today. Makes me wonder how many more people were famous but ephemeral, and which stars of today will be like that 100 years from now.

    Also, the idea that we’d all just get together at scales like that to see something is, apart from pro sports, pretty foreign in a land where we can stream it all at home.

  42. I’d say almost all of the 1800s till ww1 except for the civil war, 1812, and Monroe doctrine, most people probably don’t remember much about that time. There’s so much history in the 1800s that I feel like most people forget or just don’t know

  43. The Gilded Age really gets shafted in terms of how it’s taught, at least. For labor relations, capitalism, political upheaval, social and demographic changes, etc, it’s one of the most fascinating periods of American history and any time I read about it as an adult I get mad at how poorly and dully it was taught in school.

  44. Hello,

    A lot of American history prior to 1492 is undocumented or under documented.

    Regards,

    Aryeh Goretsky

  45. the 1920s-1930s were crazy, we had small wars over coal miner protests, companies bought entire towns and essentially tried to force the residents to keep working in the mines at gunpoint, the national guard used planes to drop bombs on miner protesters who had taken up arms at the battle of blair mountain. There was also the prohibition(government tried to ban alcohol), great depression, at one point there was an attempted facsist overthrow of the government by ww1 veterans who hadnt been payed for their service. 20s-30s were crazy

  46. The post WW1 era (1918-1922~) was insane. One of the worst economic declines in american history, extremist movements emerged everywhere, the red summer saw the massacre of thousands of black americans throughout the country, the second KKK emerged and effectively took over huge swaths of the country, the spanish flu was basically covid 1.0, anti-semitism and anti-catholicism and racism reached a fever pitch, tens of thousands of anarchists and leftists were arrested on trumped up charges… it was a crazy, revolutionary, scary time. At the time people genuinely thought the country was on the verge of insurrection/revolution.

    It’s not taught very widely in schools at all, mostly because its hard to teach an ‘era’. We teach individual events to an extent, with some events such as the tulsa massacre becoming more widely known.

  47. The atrocities we commited in the Philippines. I dont think its taught here. I think like 1 million people died for imperialisms. Not to mention the people raped, beaten, tortured etc.

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