Reply #56: I read a lot about American history when I was a young, but

[Lydia Leftcoast]

here were some surprises I encountered as an adult:

1) In the 1940s and 1950s, Minneapolis was the most anti-Semitic large city in the U.S. You may recall that Al Franken and the Coen brothers were from the suburb of St. Louis Park. That's because it was the only suburb that allowed Jews to own land.

2) The Lakota were originally a woodland tribe that was pushed westward due to pressure from other tribes being pushed westward by European settlers

3) Only one attendee at the Seneca Falls Conference lived long enough to see women being allowed to vote nationwide. (She was only 19 at the time of the conference.)

4) In the nineteenth century before the Civil War, the U.S. was not a particularly religious nation. Even the Puritans had mostly morphed into Unitarians and Congregationalists. The most influential institution in most northeastern towns was the Masonic temple.

5) In the late nineteenth century, German held the same position in the U.S. that Spanish does now. Bilingual education meant English and German, and every major city had German language newspapers, social clubs, churches, and neighborhoods where people could spend their whole lives without speaking English.