My high school US history class spent like two weeks on the revolutionary war, half a class on everything that happened up to the civil war, two or three weeks on the civil war, half a class on the rest of the 19th century, like a week on WWII, the roaring 20's and dusbowl 30's got a week, and the rest of the class was World War 2, the 4 years that made up 60% of our 250 year history.
I have two hypotheses for why it was like that and they're not mutually exclusive:
-
WWII ends on a very boastful note for the USA. The defeat of not one but two objectively evil empires through both military and industrial might, that and having basically none of the fighting on our soil meant we came out of the war powerful and rich, eclipsing Great Britain as the superpower in the west. Almost immediately after that, history gets a lot less flattering.
-
The boomers were in charge of setting the school curriculum circa 2002, and by their logic "Then World War 2 happened, and then I was born, and then stuff I personally remember happened, and because I personally remember it, it isn't "history" therefore we don't have to teach it. You learn about Upton Sinclair in history class, you learn about the Cuban Missile Crisis by watching the news, that's just how it is."
