“I had a high school history teacher who showed us a preview copy of our textbook. It had a photo of a lynching and a section about it. Our actual books had nothing.”

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Responses have been taken from threads 1 and 2.

Disclaimer: This piece contains mentions of death, drug use, and violence.

"Not just that, the “study” continued for decades after penicillin became an effective treatment for syphilis. The Tuskegee researchers knew about the treatment but still allowed the disease to go untreated in their study subjects until 1972. The study ultimately led to major changes in medical research ethics, including the development of the Belmont Report and stronger requirements around informed consent and independent review of research studies."

"Queen Liliʻuokalani was going to modify the Hawaiian Constitution to allow non-landowners to vote, which would have greatly increased the Native Hawaiian voice in their government. The mostly white plantation owners, led by the president of Dole, the fruit company (who were also dual citizens of the U.S.), lied to U.S. Navy officers at Pearl Harbor and convinced them to send Marines to protect U.S. citizens. They wound up holding the queen under house arrest in ʻIolani Palace and seized control of the Hawaiian government. They formed a brief republic with Dole as president and were quickly annexed by the U.S. afterward."

"Standing Bear had an incredibly tragic story. His people were forced from their native land and made to march across what are now several states. His son died during the journey, but before he died, he asked his dad to take his body home. When Standing Bear attempted to do so, he was arrested and, while on trial, made the statements you mentioned."

"As stated above, the protests were for better treatment of workers. Most of the protesters and workers were German immigrants. German anarchists were more likely to strike due to their philosophy and mostly being against a capitalist society. Police were present to maintain order and protect the McCormick factory and bosses. There were reports of the owner paying off the police to rough up the workers and get physical with them. At this time, Chicago was blatantly corrupt, as opposed to today, where corruption is an art form.

Some time during the protest, a pipe bomb was thrown at a group of police officers. The bomb blew up, officers died, and police returned fire toward the protesters. Some protesters died. It was a terrible, no-good, very bad day.

People who were seen as the ringleaders were hanged for their actions. However, there was no direct evidence that the people on trial had thrown the bomb or were inciting the act. It was an unfair trial that resulted in more unnecessary deaths at the hands of the state.

There were more strikes and events before and after the Haymarket Riot/Affair. There was also a bigger benefit than just an eight-hour workday."

"3. The overthrow of the Guatemalan government under President Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz started a popular land reform program in which the government repossessed a bunch of unused land from the United Fruit Company (presently known as Chiquita Banana Co.) for a value that the company wasn't happy with. They paid the company the value it had been claiming on its taxes for years, a purposefully lowball value used to cheat on its taxes, mind you. When the Guatemalan government refused to pay up the ridiculous sum that United Fruit wanted, the company had the State Department stage a coup to overthrow Arbenz and install a government that was more "friendly" toward US interests.

4. COINTELPRO, in which the FBI actively surveilled and attempted to blackmail, sabotage, and, in some cases, murder prominent civil rights activists."

"I had a high school history teacher who showed us a preview copy of our textbook. It had a photo of a lynching and a section about it. Our actual books had nothing."

"In 1891, 11 Italians in New Orleans, Louisiana, were lynched for their alleged role in the murder of police chief David Hennessy. It was the largest mass lynching in U.S. history. The lynching took place the day after the trial of nine of the 19 men indicted in the murder. Six of these defendants had been acquitted, and a mistrial had been declared for the remaining three because the jury failed to agree on a verdict. Believing the jury had been bribed, a mob broke into the jail where the men were being held and killed 11 of them. The mob numbered in the thousands and included some of the city's most prominent citizens. American press coverage of the event was largely congratulatory, and those responsible for the lynching were never charged."

"I lived in Oklahoma for most of my life. I took Oklahoma history, and it wasn't mentioned. You know what was mentioned? Native Americans, not in Oklahoma, but everywhere before they moved to Oklahoma. Then, for the last two weeks of the class, we discussed Native Americans in Oklahoma and the Land Run. End of course.

I never learned about the riots until my dad was randomly browsing Wikipedia one day, stumbled upon it, and showed it to me."

"Several known deaths have been associated with Project MKUltra, most notably that of Frank Olson. Olson, a United States Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in November 1953 as part of a CIA experiment and died under suspicious circumstances a week later. A CIA doctor assigned to monitor Olson claimed to have been asleep in another bed in a New York City hotel room when Olson exited the window and fell 13 stories to his death. In 1953, Olson's death was described as a suicide that occurred during a severe psychotic episode."

"He was an idiot. The reason he was denied his voyage so many times was because people knew how large the Earth was at the time, to within a fraction of a percent, and there was no way they thought they would survive a voyage from Europe all the way to Asia. He refused to believe the math of many professionals, instead thinking he had some sort of special ability to determine the circumference of the world by using ancient estimates that weren't based on any scientific principles.

Then, even after Columbus found the Americas, he refused to believe he hadn't arrived in India, even after his next few voyages. Everyone else seemed to realize it wasn't fucking India except for him.

Not only was he an idiot, but he was also cruel and a general asshole, making people pay him monthly gold allowances or risk being maimed or otherwise enslaved. His first haul back from the Americas was a bunch of slaves because he couldn't obtain enough gold to ensure he would personally be sent back for more."

"I am a Native American from Canada, and I have heard so many horrible stories from residential school survivors. That's really how bad it was, that they have to call them “survivors.” After residential schools, a lot of the former students turned to drugs and alcohol because of the things they went through. A lot of them have even taken their own lives. Residential schools really fucked up a generation of Native people."

"To add one thing to this: being a Unionist did not mean you were an abolitionist at the time. In states like Texas (which I see you're specifically referencing), the culture of racism was so deeply ingrained that being an open abolitionist would have been unthinkable. Suicidal, even. People would throw you out of your community."

"Not only this, but the Filipino rebels fought alongside the Americans under the pretense that if they helped the Americans win, they would get their independence. America was like, lol, no, we are trying to become an imperial power.

This whole period was weird for the USA in general. It's was long enough after the Revolution and Civil War for America to finally begin to reach out and become powerful, since they'd finally essentially gotten their shit together. It was also near the end of the global imperialism phase, but this was mostly because there wasn't much else for European powers to conquer without being met with violent resistance from the countries they conquered that were developed enough to hold their own, or violent response from the European country they already controlled that colony. Coincidentally enough, just like the Spanish-American War, which is what gave the U.S. the Philippines in the first place. To say it wasn't going on at all would be a lie, but it was at a much, much smaller scale in comparison to the past three or four centuries."

"They also scalped many of the dead, regardless of whether they were women, children, or infants. Chivington and his men dressed their weapons, hats, and gear with scalps and other body parts, including human fetuses and male and female genitalia. They also publicly displayed these battle trophies in Denver's Apollo Theater and area saloons."

"When the leaders of the Nazi Party were put on trial, they defended their eugenics program by saying it was modeled after the U.S. eugenics program."

"Yes, part of this is the self-mythologizing by the Kennedy administration, which cast JFK in a heroic role. But it is also true that the role of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey was not fully known until 1997, when recordings of the Kennedy Cabinet became public."

"Saratoga is where they surrendered, but it is not where they were defeated. 

I attribute the highlight on these two battles in particular to the result of both New York and Texas school boards selecting textbooks for the public school system. It motivates publishers to ramp up and highlight the importance of those states' activities beyond their actual story."

"Unfortunately, Operation Northwoods is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to corruption and abuse of power in the American government. 

I swear, if our mainstream news media spent a few days adequately informing the American public about all the sketchy shit our government has been caught doing behind our backs, all the contrived, evil schemes they failed to cover up completely, conservatives and liberals would unite to overthrow our government in the blink of an eye."

Text has been edited for length and clarity.