Thank all of you for helping me understand my initial question. You have all given me very interesting and thought-provoking answers. I am looking forward to holding this discussion in the United States when I move there in a few months.

I meant to get back to this but others have provided the answers I would have given. I would just reiterate the importance of historiography in shaping the opinions and attitudes of a particular culture.

A big point is that many of the black spots we look back on now are with modern eyes. In the mindsets of the times these were generally not "bad" things to do. Not just from a political perspective but consider environmental issues. Consider the mining, industrial pollution, dumping in streams/lakes, sprawl, etc. Now days, with our 'civilized' eyes, we are trying to stop "third world" nations from doing this while they go thru their modernizations. But when US, UK, France, Germany, etc. all went thru this initially the billowing smoke, ravaged forests, oil well fields and massive strip mines were all seen as signs of progress. I’m sure there are things being done by many modern “civilized” nations that will be disgraceful in another 50-200 years.

History is written by EVERYONE to shine the best light for their view on those it's trying to teach. I have had some very interesting conversations with people who lived or worked in Japan regarding how the educational systems deal with the roles played in WWII. I’m not just talking about Pearl Harbor, but the actions in China prior to official outbreak and the battles fought after the start of the war. I have also talked with a few people that have had different things to say about how the German education system covers events since the 1920s. Some of this has been positive, some of it not so. I'm sure history books in post-Soviet countries would be pretty interesting to read as well, going back through Stalin and the full USSR period. And I couldn’t imagine what China’s official education system would have to say about modern times.

In our modern world where so many sources of global information are so easily available I believe a lot more honesty is being forced into the light, but we're talking about just a single generation perhaps, and formal education is probably going to lag for another decade or more in many areas. Until then people will continue to learn history with rose-tinted glasses.

On a related note though, I have a bit of a "get over it" feeling when it comes to a lot of this. Not necessarily for things within the last 50 or perhaps 100 years because those communities, people or their direct decedents may still be around and impacted. Even there though there are places to draw lines. Going back more than that though? No. Do residents of the UK still hate Scandinavians just because Vikings used to terrorize their coasts? Do the French still hold a grudge against Britain for the defeat of their Napoleonic empire (ok…maybe)? I know some people back around my home in Florida that seem to think the American Civil War just ended (or is perhaps on hold). I know someone that I think still blames modern Japan for the attack on Pearl Harbor. And I have known people that still have feelings of entitlement that they are “owed” for something done “to them” a couple hundred years ago. Get over it.

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I think another aspect of imperialism that tends to be overlooked is economic imperialism. It's not state sanctioned, but it has virtually the same effect - American or Western companies can set up companies in cheap areas with sympathetic governments, and exploit the local workforce. It happened in Cuba for quite a while under the pre-revolutionary regimes, with plantations providing a lot of sugar to the States. The companies had basically made the Cuban economy entirely dependent on sugar, so market fluctuations were an economic hurricane throughout the 30s and 40s. My history prof the other day mentioned Firestone rubber plantations in Liberia, another similar situation. Firestone set up a business the Liberian government believed would contribute to their country's economic growth, but the profits went straight back to the States. So ironically, even today, the historically free, self-governed state of Liberia bears the marks of imperialism. There are plenty of other examples, but I haven't studied that part for my history exam yet, ahaha. Just watch you don't get labelled as anti-capitalist - remember that a lot of Western hegemony and wealth is the result of colonialism.

Sticky Fingers, a good book to read on the topic of the failings of the American Education system is "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James Loewen. It's from the mid 90s so hopefully some of the outright lies in American history textbooks have been improved, but even in Canada when I was in high school we were taught a lot of the same sanitized, Anglo-American friendly history. You end up with a sort of nationalistic myth instead of anything at all like serious academic history. I like to think that it's not as bad in Canada, but there still are some of the same tendencies. Canadians like to brag of the reputation of martial prowess our troops gained in the First World War, but no one knows about the reputation for brutality and war crimes. So watch out, taking liberties with historical knowledge is not, as American textbooks will tell you, limited to the USSR or Nazi Germany.

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Thanks everybody again, and I will definetly check out that book TheEggman.