America’s First Foreign War They Don’t Teach You About

I remember this from elementary school!!

"Forgotten" by who? It's only in the first lines of the Marine Hymn.

Education has really taken a shit. I learned about this in HS over 30 years ago.

lol, an ad read on a history channel mentioning only a 35 year history of a company whose founder was one of the main people behind the US stock market. Seriously?

WOW.
This anti-American, racist propaganda left out a TREMENDOUS amount of information in relation to the Barbary Slave Trade. Most people didn't get ransomed, they were worked and starved to death then replaced with a new slave.

The was graffiti that I found carved into stone on the Greek isle Delos that said it was some american soldir was there and the year which fell around the same years as this videos scope. I wonder if they were related.

I don't mean to be a dick, but who didn't learn about this?

This got covered when I was in middle school as part of American history and again in high school for the same subject.

Is it not a common subject covered in most schools in the US?

The origin of USS Tripoli‘s name.

one of America’s oldest traditions 😂

Please get a narrator who enunciates.

"In The Margins is a series that covers the history they didn’t teach in school" – The left has had a stranglehold on academia since the late 60's, PBS. You've had 60 yrs to tell this history so WHY is it that this stuff is only being brought to light now by you people? It seems obvious to me that with the looming threat of your channel being dissolved due to decades of political bias that you guys are pumping out all of these stories to try and get your target audience to donate revenue to keep you afloat. It's disgusting how all of the world's biggest public media companies funded by taxpayers (PBS, NPR, CBC, BBC, etc) are all left wing echo chambers. You need to represent the views and interests of ALL the citizens of the country that funds your existence or you deserve to get the plug pulled. I say this as a Green Party member who left the Dems after the Wall Street bailout treachery.

War is Peace!

If American ships had been capturing Barbary and Ottoman merchant vessels at sea to keep the loot and sell captives into slavery in America, this would be called yet another example of American imperialism, racism, and evil. But when Barbary ships are capturing American merchant vessels to take the loot and sell captives into slavery, this is here whitewashed as being in accordance with Barbary law and so acceptable, and to fight against that is imperialist, colonialist, and racist. The standards for judging actions of peoples or nations must be universal. All human cultures have engaged in violence, genocide, enslavement, colonization, etc. All human beings are the same in this. We are all capable of great good, great evil, as well as various shades of mediocrity. That's one of the lessons of studying world history.

:0:10 don't we get gas from the foods of fodmaps … oh wait . nevermind

These videos often present a version of American exceptionalism. Not the nationalistic "everything America has done is great and wonderful kind of exceptionalism, but a "everything America has done is wrong and evil and racist" kind of exceptionalism. America is not exceptional. We've done many evil things. All peoples have. What the Barbary states was doing was evil; in this case, the American response was justified. We need to take an unbiased approach to history, recognizing the evils no matter who perpetrated them, not hyping them when one side does them and excusing them when the other side does.

And Americans and the Europeans were obeying their laws–and the laws of the African kingdoms like Dahomey–when they bought enslaved Africans from Africa and brought them to their colonies. Doesn't make it right. It was wrong and evil. The Barbary states capturing ships for loot and to sell those on them into slavery, demanding a ransom and tribute to not do so, was equally wrong and evil. Also, the took captives to feed their slave trade–not only from ships taken in the Mediterranean, but also by raiding European villages and cities up and down the coast all the way to Iceland in order to feed their slave trade.

Good video but I don’t like the clickbait title. I learned about the Barbary wars in high school as did most people I know. I know that’s anecdotal and I wouldn’t be surprised if most Americans didn’t learn this but that doesn’t mean all didn’t.

The main objective of the War of 1812 was the annexation of Canada, the impressment of US sailors was merely the casus belli.

It has been a while since I have been disappointed by anything PBS has put out, and the first failure in my view of this otherwise excellent Origins series.

First, let's get over the click-bait title "they don't teach you about". For the majority of Americans, high school history is the last history class they take. This is an introductory class of 36 weeks to an audience that is also going through an emergent identity crisis and raging hormones. I have been a high school history teacher for seventeen years (born of my own sincere criticisms of how public education and textbooks in particular fail in teaching history). You should not criticize someone's swimming unless you acknowledge the current.

Even in the best of conditions, when you have 36 weeks to cover everything from 1500 to 2020 it is like zooming out on Google Earth; only the most prominent features will stand out. The First Barbary War is one of those details that lacks relevancy at this scale, even as much as you exaggerated its magnitude. America wasn't inventing itself as a power build from foreign trade, it was copying Britain at a time when most of our leaders had been born as British subjects. Since America never really attempted to be more than a regional player until the late 1800s, it's hard to connect our global dominance to this event when you have so many better examples like the US-Philippine War.

The historic perspective was just wrong here. America's first foreign war was probably the Northwest Indian War of 1775 to 1785. America's closest and most important foreign powers were Indian nations, and the majority had sided with Britain or been coaxed into neutrality during the Revolution. The Treaty of Fallen Timbers of 1794 saw America developing a sense of imperial progression across the continent. Both Washington and Jefferson spent thought and energy towards a uniform policy of dispossessing indigenous people of their lands through economic dependency and cultural assimilation (a policy that did not end until 1975). Without this, there would be no "Empire of Liberty" for Jefferson and Webster to gush about, no organized expansion into the South and then Manifest Destiny. Our imperial push only paused in the 1890s as we shifted from direct rule to indirect rule, which proved to be more economical in the long run and has made America the greatest empire on Earth…with all of the costs that entails.

This surprised me, as this series has done such a good job recognizing colonialism as an important theme in American history on previous episodes. To elevate an obscure Mediterranean conflict, you have supported the erasure of the importance of Native nations and imperialism in America's past…you could have done a much better job of presenting the interesting elements of the First Barbary War, because there are some useful comparisons and entertaining elements to the history. This has been a notable step down in the quality of your work.

“They don’t care until it affects them” huh, intrinsically American apparently.

"America's First Foreign War They Don't Teach You About" My history teacher in junior high did talk about this, actually.