I mean, we had a direct war against them, so it's interesting how hostilities have died down. I suppose it has been over two centuries. But the USA was founded on antagonizing the British, leading to the nationalism that was able to unite the colonies against the Loyalists and win the Revolutionary War.
We all know the way that the Revolutionary War is taught in American textbooks. Americans are painted as the honest farmers who simply want to be recognized by the Crown. (Actual reasons for revolt varied much more than that, I suspect.) So how are the American colonists depicted in British textbooks? I would predict we are painted as rebels that ran off with the colonies and abandoned the motherland that spawned us. That is fair enough, I suppose. It's just interesting how perspectives change everything.
History sometimes seems really universal and concrete. I mean, if a certain battle occurred on a certain date, etc. etc., then how much is there that can be fabricated or twisted? In two ways is this assumption incorrect. First, as the cliche goes, history is written by the victors, so any losers that were stamped out have no voice in what we hear today. (Perhaps we lost evidence of any more egalitarian, pacifist societies that were overrun by the war-friendly; we shall never know.) Second, it is difficult to realize that even in the "unified" present there are still so many fault lines where we differ. (The present being commonly described as "unified" in the sense that the internet is able to share ideas and when international relations are arguably at their most prioritized point to date.) We could learn so much just by looking at the differences in what our children are taught to be facts.
A lot of this internal discussion was spawned from the following picture from my favorite webcomic, Married to the Sea.
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