Bletchley code breaker Betty Webb dies aged 101

Perhaps I wasn’t clear. Real history is much more persuasive. US elites love patriotic history and try to enforce it in schools.

I agree with you, but I would also add that real history is also typically much more uncomfortable, for nearly everyone. It can also be legitimately controversial as there's truly a lot that we don't really know, particularly around people's motiviations and sometimes true beliefs. For example it was common practice for people to burn any letters that didn't reinforce or support what they wanted history to remember. It takes someone with real dedication towards separating themselves emotionally from the topic to attempt an accurate portrayal, and that is a rare quality indeed. Certainly not a quality widespread enough to be present in every middle school and high school history teacher (though there are some excellent ones out there).

Some examples of the discomfort: to many white people now the history of slavery and racism is deeply uncomfortable. It's not even difficult to find hard evidence of such as many racist attitudes persisted well into the era of recordings and have been immortalized in movies and TV shows. I suspect a big part of that is the recency effect since we're still living with many follow-on effects of the practice even if we don't practice it actively anymore.

Much less talked about though is the history of racism and slavery among nearly all people at different times. For example a large majority of the black slaves that were sold to Europeans (including the Europeans living in the Americas) were originally enslaved by other black Africans and sold to the slave traders. Not all the slaves were sold either. To be fair the Spanish (at least in first half of the new world exploration) didn't have much of a problem doing the enslaving themselves as they routinely enslaved native people's after conquering them. We can also go back millenia and see the same behavior. Greeks, Romans, Persians, pretty much everybody had their slaves for as far back as history is recorded (and surely much, much farther).

We like to think we are enlightened nowadays, but I think history really demonstrates that as humans we are almost universally inclined toward enslaving other humans. Hopefully we're irreversibly past that now and well on our path to the Star Trek society, but even if that is the case it doesn't make the history any more comfortable.

I think white ppl (i’m one of them) should get over themselves. We’ve been the bad guys of history and we need to face it and correct course. It’s not written in our fate, it’s in settler colonial ideology and capitalism. We can adopt a new outlook in solidarity with our brothers and sisters and the world and make a fairer more decent world. Being uncomfortable is ok

The vast majority of nations teach an (at best) sanitised or (at worst) jiongoist version of their own history in their classrooms. The US is not an exception.

some are worse than others, or at least, the consequences of the world hegemon teaching jingoistic history has really terrible results for all of humanity. one can envision an ideal world where the most powerful countries both emphasized a scientific and empathetic understanding of history combined with a sense of responsibility to decolonize the world and shepard institutions for constructing a more equal world, but we do not have that. instead we have a murderous former slaver settler-colonial nation that used to pay lip service to human rights doing realpolitik regime change around the world and settler-colonialism in Palestine.