Historical events that Americans see differently?

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Not sure where else to post this question. If I posted to Reddit's "Ask an American" sub it would probably be removed on the basis of "agenda pushing" but I'm genuinely interested. However on WP's Random forum it probably won't get much notice, however it doesn't clearly belong in PP&R (although it could become political).

So here are 2 examples of historical events that Americans generally view differently from the rest of the world:

1.) The War of 1812 (at least in contrast to Canadians).
2.) The Chilean Coup of 1973.

Anything else come to mind? Or any other thoughts on this topic?

The war of 1812 is viewed in the US as our "second revolution". The Brits were bullies pushing us around. So we showed them.

The two superpowers, France, and Britain, were fighting a world war (the wars of Napoleon). And the new weak fledgling US sought to stay neutral, and, ironically, had to fight two wars to stay out of war (a small brief naval war with France in 1805, and a larger war with Britain in 1812). But Americans also had the added incentive of using British outrages (like impressing US sailors at sea) as an excuse for territorial aggression. It gave us an excuse to try to seize Canada from Britain. So our motives were totaly pure.

We had already tried to "liberate" canada in the Revolutionary war, and tried again to invade Canada in the war of 1812.

But I suspect that Canadians think about the war of 1812, and how they kicked the US's ass, more often than Americans think about it.

What about it do you believe Americans see differently from people elsewhere?

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I guess the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be added as number 3?.. Are Americans still taught in school that their country saved the world by doing it?

I don't know what country you live in or how old you are, but I'll try to summarize the situation.

In the early 70s, a Marxist, Salvador Allende Gossens won the Presidency of Chile by a plurality i.e. I don't know the details of the Chilean constitution but simply put most voters voted for somebody else and I don't think Chile is a parliamentary system that allows for the formation of coalitions. Anyway, as a Marxist, his administration was thought to give the Soviet Union a new opportunity for influence in South America. So the American government (this is a broad generalization of what happened but seems to be the accepted version of events) engineered a military junta that violently overthrew Allende Gossens' government, in fact killing him, as well as suspending the constitution.This action on the part of the US was entirely consistent with Cold War policy at the time. This military regime became one of the most reviled in the world, but I will suggest that much of the negative focus was precisely because it had replaced a government deemed sympathetic to the aims of the Soviet Union, at a time when the Soviet Union had a great deal of "grass-roots" support outside its immediate sphere of influence and millions of people in the West including in particular Italy and France were self-identified Communists (although most disavowed support for the Soviet Union per se). BTW I find it interesting that all these "grass roots Marxists" sort of vanished when the Cold War ended.

Anyway, "world opinion" thenceforward pointed to this coup as a an example of a major international crime on the part of the US and would be mentioned by anybody to whom you might want to say that America is primarily a "force for good" in the world, whereas most Americans who are aware of the events in question probably see it as an unfortunate but necessary consequence of Cold War policy, and some might also claim that the previous Marxist government had in fact taken a path that could have led to a One Party Marxist-Leninist state like Cuba and that the military junta that replaced it was no worse than dozens of other authoritarian regimes and in fact saved the Chilean economy from ruin.

BTW I am not trying to take either side of this argument, I am just trying to summarize what I meant when I said that Americans largely take a different view of this historical event than most of the rest of the world.


I don't know about "saving the world". Most Americans are aware of what was done to people living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but have been told (rightly or wrongly) that any other way of bringing about an end to Japanese imperialism would have been even bloodier, if more conventionally so. BTW if you aren't familiar with the history of Japan's imperial expansion in the early 20th Century, you should read about it. It is a litany of atrocities. I would say that Americans are genuinely torn between shame over having bombed those cities and belief there was no choice at the time, or at least none our leaders could think of.

The very same historical event:

British call it "The American Revolution"
Americans calls it "The War of Independence"

Not sure where you get your information from. As a life-long American, I would say that "The American Revolution" is the term most frequently used in the US. I don't know what term is used in Britain or for that matter by descendants of Loyalists living on the shores of Lake Ontario. I actually consider "War of Independence" to be a term used by people (pseudo-intellectuals?) who want to distinguish it from "real" revolutions such as the ones in France and Russia. Likewise, calling the "American Civil War" the "War Between the States" is an attempt to more "accurately" characterize it without conflating it with more "genuine" civil wars such as those that took place in Spain and Lebanon.

Yes. Books here in the US use "Revolutionary War", and "War of Independence" pretty much interchangeably. And "back in the Revolutionary War" is what Americans will usually say if the topic comes up in actual conversation.

NOT totally pure is what I meant! Darn!

You might well get Oliver Stone interested in a film about Allende.

But yes...the event has receded into academic land. American academics who think the coup was evil vs American academics who think it was a necessary evil.

It's my impression that if you set foot outside the US, including Canada and Mexico, you will find that the former point of view predominates overwhelmingly. Of course you may have to ask around a bit to find people aware of the history. I am quite certain what you'd find in Cuba, as I suspect that topic looms large in the version of history taught in Cuban schools, and I seriously doubt that Cuban schoolchildren are offered an unbiased view.

@MaxE

Oh okay. I thought you meant something more specific about the Allende/Pinochet episode, since you mentioned it in isolation. I think it falls more broadly under the category of "you left me no choice, I'm beating you for your own good" type of episodes throughout recent history (where most people around the world think the US was hypocritical and overstepped its bounds, while part of the US believes it was justified some way or another, boiling down to exceptionalism).

About imperial Japan, yeah, from all I've heard about it, it seems like it was every bit as bad as Nazi Germany. But I wouldn't mention that when the subject is whether or not the bombing was justified. The mass killing of civilians is never justified, and it happened twice. The way I see it, it marked the beginning of the cold war era more so than it marked the end of WW2.

I call it The American Revolution and I live in Canada.

Maybe, maybe not, depends on the place, and you won't necessarily find the expected opinions in the expected places. 2021 is a weird time. These days it's even common here in Brazil to see people publicly defending a return to "the good old days of the military regime". Our current "president" ran on a platform of doing exactly just that (which he didn't actually do, because, well... I guess that would be too much work). He won by a pretty large margin. He, and by extension his more loyal followers, are blindly pro-US (or pro-Republican at least). In short, these days you just never know.