Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer
The Historical Narrative(Part One)
Every culture has it's own historical narrative. Example, the Modern West attempts to go as far back as practical, Islamic societies often prefer to ignore everything pre-Islamic. In the West we fight over which cultures to include, in Islamic cultures the secularists and Nationalists fight to include pre-Islamic history and the Islamists struggle to erase the same.
The 3I would clearly need to deal with Earth's history, but they would also shape the narrative for their legitamacy. One assumes that the English and American Civil Wars and the American Revolution would be seriously downplayed. Washington, Franklin, Lincoln, Cromwell, would all be hot potatoes. Irish history would also be downplayed, for similar reasons, and Gandhi would be passed over in silence.
On the other hand the French and Russian Revolutions would recieve great deals of attention, as would the whole of French history from the Wars of Religion to the Fall of the 3rd Republic. France would get used as a lesson in what Nobles shouldn't do, the dangers of religious fanaticism, and the limits of republican governments.
The British Empire (a severely bowlerisied version) would be seen as a ideal. Churchill, and his more generous statements, would be forgrounded. F.D.R. would be a walk-on character, Eleanore wouldn't be mentioned.
More speculations later.
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This seems not only very Terrocentric, but too much focused on Europe and the US.
You've also used a small slice of Earth's history, just a few centuries. What about Sargon of Akkad? He's arguably as relevant to citizens of the Imperium as is George Washington. I doubt that most people living so far in the future would know or care much about the times, places, and people you mention. They would have events much closer to them in time, things from the history of the Third Imperium and perhaps the Second , things to which they could better relate. Let's not forget the much longer history of the Ziru Sirka! The founding of the Ziru Sirka would be many orders of magnitude more important than some petty colonial rebeliion on Earth in prestarflight times (AR), or the four year disruption/breakup of some obscure planet-bound federation(ACW).
There are many other inhabited worlds, all with their own histories. I agree that Earth, like Vland and Sylea, probably gets a disproportinate level of attention from historians and pop culture- but let's not forget about the many other worlds of the Imperium . The sheer volume of information avaiilable toTU historians boggles the mind...
The only reason why
most people would have heard of the ancient polity known as the 'United States of America' , IMO, is the Solomani-Vilani First Contact at Barnard's Star. That's a fun bit of anicent history trivia, the sort of thing your pull out at a party to look clever. The USA lasted only a few centuries as a soveriegn power. It was brought under the rule of the TC just a few hundred years after it came into being. Historians specialized in the stellar-transitional era of Terran history would know some American history, of course.
YMMV, as always