I've noticed a kind of orthodoxy and USA-first/US-only perspective amongst many on the Left the last few years. Not a patriotic USA-is-great stance, but a focus on US history as the main or only history for reference.
A common rhetorical claim is that we (the US?) has historical amnesia, that these things have not been taught in school. I don't know how anyone gets away with saying such a thing -in my hillbilly Bible Belt Arkansas elementary school we learned of the Trail of Tears, the antebellum Southern slave plantation economy and more before sixth grade. A companion claim is that white people are uncomfortable with these historical facts and trying to suppress the information in schools or general discussion.
And what if this is true amongst some whites, or some particular school districts? (I mean historical amnesia or suppression of some historical events) The last thing I am advocating is enabling such a practice in any academic setting.
What I will advocate is more history, not less. This undoes abuses and prejudices from either extreme. Specifically, more history of the world, treating the US as a small footprint of both time and land area in the mix of it all.
In another of my blog postings The African Slave Traders Who Exported to the Middle East and Asia it undoes the myopic ignorance error of the 1619 agenda by highlighting slave trading beginning around 200 BC that involved no Europeans, only African slave ports created by an African society, Arab slave traders linking west Africa to Arabia/India/China and Arab, Indian and Chinese slave buyers.
I must interject a point here on war in African and Native American cultures regarding slavery - do you know what had to be done with enemies in war? I mean the ones not killed in battle and I especially mean the women and children. They were all either entirely killed or taken into slavery. Muslim kingdoms did this to Eastern Europeans (Ottoman versus Russian). In the case of Africa, the tribal societies made a business out of it, instead of genociding an opponent tribe they got a few foreign made items in exchange for the slaves. Don't wince at this little child, Seattle is named after a native chief that genocided the Chimakum tibe, killing all the men, women and children except a few, with the remaining few taken into slavery [Wikipedia:Chimakum].
How about expanding the mind of an American by finding stories of natives, trappers, colonial forts, and Wild West lifestyle (Cossacks) that is all in Russian territory? How about Russian trade in Hawaii before the US? Or indigenous natives (Ainu) with bows and arrows fighting the Japanese, and the indigenous natives are a combination of white and smaller part Siberian? Or those same Ainu moving north and battling Chinese and Russians, the same Russian agenda of fur trade that is operating in Alaska? Well, the set of Youtube documentaries below deliver on all this and more.
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