The whole fucking point of America is that 's it's the nation where you choose, better, we choose *together*, as opposed to just inheriting whatever centuries old baggage your family or culture's been saddled with.
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Modern conservatism is deeply un-American, and personally I'm glad to see Democrats and liberals taking this approach instead of instinctively dropping into a crouch and trying to pass whatever increasingly ridiculous patriotism/authenticity test the Right has devised this week.
Used to be a time Minnesota lumberjacks wrote home to complain that for every white man in their camp there was also four Swedes. (Well, one of them did.)
This is all getting too confusing. My ancestors were Prussian, am I included in the anti German hate? I mean, they're just going to go after me for being trans, but I'm curious.
I don't know if it centered in a specific party but there was hella anti-German hate up through the first world war - especially for German Catholics.
There were metric buttloads of German-language newspapers in the US, & that terrified nativist Protestants.
Which is interesting because the Constitution pre-ratification was distributed in Dutch and German to the populations that spoke those languages in New York and Pennsylvania.
This country has never been an English-speaking Protestant country
I used to work in a newspapers collection at a university library; we had a lot of old German-language US newspapers.
We also had a run of a paper printed in Cherokee syllabary, which was wild to look at. It was like seeing something in a language you felt like you should recognize, but couldn't.
That was how my ears my first time in a bistro in the Netherlands.
Like, all the phonemes or whatever sounded English, but they did not assemble themselves into actual English words, which was deeply unsettling for 30 minutes or so.
these German-American Protestants are stealing the ethnic prejudice that rightfully belongs to us descendants of Catholic diasporas, somebody should alert the Pope
They're going to "No True Scotsman" their way into only identifying with one particular family line from Shetland that only actually lived there while it was part of the Kingdom of Norway
this is, again, what I love about the "weird" label
it IS weird to constantly look for reasons why people are not really what they are, and we should not humor it, and these people should not be taken seriously
A huge personal stumbling block to attributing accurate family baggage percentages is going to be that I don’t know if my early 1900s Asturians were the fascist or the antifa sort…or is that too recent? Are we meant to reach back to Vikings, Picts, Visigoths, Romans?
So many straws to reach for!
The US was based on self-invention as a national identity, rather than national/religious/ethnic forebears - unlike any other country ever. Self-invention and self-government are the true "American exceptionalism" - which the GOP is intent on destroying.
Eh, kind of. The original European settlers were a mix of people fleeing religious persecution and religious extremists. This has made a very strange mix of generational culture/trauma.
France's revolution (1799) was a direct consequence of the American revolution (1776).
No religion was ever the official state religion in the US, not then and not now. Christianity, OTOH, *was* the official state religion all over Europe. By law.
Theoretically, yes, practically, no. The US is still dominated by churches & religion. That's the tension. They've had a black president but won't have an openly atheist president for a while. Even Trump says he loves the Bible, couldn't pick a verse, just likes all of it.
Thinking your country is somehow "better" is itself a huge problem, very typical of colonialism. My own country has a centuries-old habit of this, I get it. But it's not a good thing.
And the US seems unusually attached to baggage from the 1700s, from a global perspective.
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https://bsky.app/profile/adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com/post/3kz7psmdure2n
And several million African Americans went, "think for a moment about how that like happened," and I haven't seen anyone bring it up since.
There were metric buttloads of German-language newspapers in the US, & that terrified nativist Protestants.
This country has never been an English-speaking Protestant country
We also had a run of a paper printed in Cherokee syllabary, which was wild to look at. It was like seeing something in a language you felt like you should recognize, but couldn't.
Like, all the phonemes or whatever sounded English, but they did not assemble themselves into actual English words, which was deeply unsettling for 30 minutes or so.
Unfortunately, I got stuck in pre-calc instead.
https://bsky.app/profile/jimmyjazz1968.bsky.social/post/3kz7vipmcv52q
I think that means we're related. Oh, it'd be back about 4 or 5 generations, but CUZ!
it IS weird to constantly look for reasons why people are not really what they are, and we should not humor it, and these people should not be taken seriously
So many straws to reach for!
The US was based on self-invention as a national identity, rather than national/religious/ethnic forebears - unlike any other country ever. Self-invention and self-government are the true "American exceptionalism" - which the GOP is intent on destroying.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/ynLFW07GJ9
Were there European countries that didn't have monarchs?
Were there countries in Europe - or anywhere else - that were founded on anything other than ethnic/religious lines?
France had a revolution round about the time America was formed.
Basically everywhere was formed in religious/ethnic lines, including America.
France's revolution (1799) was a direct consequence of the American revolution (1776).
No religion was ever the official state religion in the US, not then and not now. Christianity, OTOH, *was* the official state religion all over Europe. By law.
And the US seems unusually attached to baggage from the 1700s, from a global perspective.