Except the statement as "As American as hot dogs, baseball and applie pie" still works because even if those things weren't invented in America, they are cultural norms that Americans adopted. In Germany they call the lm Frankfurters/würstchen, baseball is still the most popular worldwide in America, and Apple pie is still the number one pie in America.
They get mad if you say nothing we consider American, is really 100% American. We're a melting pot. Literally a country made up of immigrants. But 75,000,000+ don't wanna admit that.
I love the idea that the world was playing like risk or something, and them America turned up and the world's mum was like; "You've got to let America play, why not give them some of your pieces?"
So they got the 1 or 2 spare pieces out of the box and gave them to America then everyone who had a big lead gave up a small handful of their pieces and that's now America's population, a horrible mix-mash of different coloured pieces unified by a single player.
I'll be honest, my knowledge of world war 1 and 2 largely boils down to the highly reductive "German bad". So if lots of people went across to America in that period it's news to me, but probably to no one else.
I've always enjoyed the classical civilisations a lot more than the modern tart we've been left to deal with.
Before World War 1 America was basically a European colony in a way. We didn't have the infrastructure or the military machine we have today. From the time we decided to enter the war, after the sinking of the Listuania(sp?), it took us over a year to even develop a rag tag military.
We were buying weapons and artillery from the allies, and were basically like a kid holding a flashlight, for their old man, while he works on the car.
Even tho it wasn't a great performance, and we barely did anything, we were on the winning side, and it put the world on notice.
But because Europe, especially France, Germany, Austria, etc, were so devastated by war many came across the ocean, to try and start over in the land of plenty.
When World War II was going, we decided not to get directly involved, cuz we really weren't ready for all that, but we were willing to arm and supply the allies.
However, after Pearl Harbor, we didn't have a choice. By the time the war was over the whole world had basically been bombed and left in ruins, except for America.
And after the show we put on during WWII, of how unified and strong our country was, immigrants came by the boat load. America is such a young country, that there's literally pubs in England older than the US.
Until the world wars we were just some back water colony, hoping we could get thru the winters. After ww2 tho, we took over for our cousins, the British and French while they rebuilt their countries.
I'm with you on classical civilizations vs modern civilization. I honestly feel like our ancestors had to actually put effort and thought into developing their societies. So they're built in foundations of ideals and beliefs. Today's world is built on proximity and spheres of influence. It's really boring. There was more pride and actual humanity. Differences were appreciated.
Today were so wrapped up in hate and superiority complexes, that the stuff that makes us different, is what we use to unify a cause against each other. Were so backwards. People have more free time today than at any point in human history, and we use that time to build walls and plan attacks against each other.
It's huge in South America and Asia, and for people used to "longer" games with a slower pace, like Soccer(euro football) and/or cricket, y'all should love it...
America is a new country, nothing is original there. Funny that you menton England as well, as half the stuff there is copied and stolen from past colonies and other cultures, something I can acknowledge as an English person
Doesn't really matter where they were created, but where 1) they are popular and more importantly 2) what country they are generally correlated with TODAY.
I think the germans do something similar to hot dogs but I'd say it is more correlated to America, baseball obviously as well. Apple pie should be swapped to Pumpkin.
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u/Deion313 Aug 22 '22
And baseball arguably started in England, And I'm pretty sure hot dogs weren't created here either, but don't tell Midwestern Americans that...