A nation that does not know its history is doomed to do poorly on the SAT.

With this harrowing warning in mind, we would do well to review at least the basics of U.S. history.

Otherwise, we — and here I am speaking to those who have long forgotten what the SAT even is — may just end up repeating it.

In the beginning, there was gold. There was not a lot of it, and most of it was underground.

This did not prevent scores of people of the Columbus phenotype from trying to hoard as much of it as possible.

The trouble with gold is that in large quantities it really does get very heavy, which probably explains the invention of the closed-toe shoe.

After Columbus, there came the closed-toe-shoe-wearing settlers, many of them to Jamestown and Plymouth, which were just far enough away to not annoy each other as neighbors.

The Jamestownians put up with intense heat and drought, and the Plymouth people ended up in neat retro-style cars.

Unfortunately, the cars did not prevent them from freezing when the harsh North American winter (the textbooks describe it as “really harsh”) ran its course.

Luckily for the Pilgrims, there was about to be a major shakedown of the existing social order. A political flame was kindled and burst out into the American Revolution.

The American Revolution was a revolution that was American.

What I mean by that is the Americans did the things they were good at (printing useless money and running away from the bad guys) and being revolting, which was not hard in the era before the walk-in shower.

Eventually, the Americans got so revolting that the British said “Enough with them!” and granted us official independence in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris, not to be confused with the 1898 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish-American War, nor the 1951 Treaty of Paris, which established the European Coal and Steel Community (whatever that is).

There were a few decades of fighting useless wars with names like “The War of 1812” when it actually was from 1812 to 1815. Why they didn’t name it “The War of 1812 and 1813 and 1814 and 1815” is beyond me.

Next up in the class of historical heavy hitters was the American Civil War, which was fought over the basic principle of whether it’s okay to own people. There was only one answer to that question, but it took the nation four years of slaughter to definitively state: “No. Mostly.”

There followed the era of Reconstruction, where a lot of Southern people reconstructed a lot of legal codes to be oppressive to former slaves.

What followed was an era poetically referred to as the Gilded Age, because a lot of the big names of the day were gilt-y of abusing their employees, at least the poorer ones.

The nation roared into the twentieth century in neat retro-style cars that were definitely of the Ford, not the Plymouth, variety.

We then proceeded to fight two world wars. I don’t know whether it was the fault of the cool cars or not, but people invented some pretty gruesome ways to hurt each other. One such person, I assume, was the ancestor of the inventor of the weed whacker.

Now we’re in the modern era, which gets older all the time. As for where it will lead, we’re lucky to have the consensus of many august historians: nobody knows.

–

Copyright 2025 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.