> Well, I'll never forget in my senior yr. at UCSC in a great class
> taught by Wally Goldfrank, . . . a fellow senior asked, "What is this
> Berlin Wall you are talking about?"
>
I once had a student ask me, "If there was a World War II, there must have been a World War I, right? What was that?"
But then I know highly intelligent, educated, politically active people who in the 1980s did not know how many Vietnams there were -- they thought there were still two. ("Just one,I said -- that was what the war was about.")
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What I find remarkable, among both students and the general public, is a weird compression of American history. I've heard literally dozens of persons express a belief that the Civil War occurred in the 20th century. Evidently, the civil rights era and Civil war era are conflated into a single time-frame. Very strange.