There are a lot of genocides that were never mentioned in my 1990s US public school education. Meanwhile, I had multiple classes over the years that taught the Holocaust (to some level of detail). How did the Holocaust get picked as the one we would study year after year?
Example of other genocides that I don't recall being taught:
There are also some things I'm not sure count as genocides but feel similar in that people organized to do a thing and then a lot of people died. The "a lot of people died" seemed to be the primary significance of the Holocaust when I heard about it in school. Examples of these "a lot of people died":
Is there something that distinguishes these other events from the Holocaust? E.g., availability of records, perpetrators no longer a major world power, victims still a world power, etc.? Or was my school just bad at teaching history?
Edit: I fully believe in the Holocaust. I do not want to hear your conspiracy theories about how Jews control the media. Holy shit.
Hi there! You’ve asked a question along the lines of ‘why didn’t I learn about X’. We’re happy to let this question stand, but there are a variety of reasons why you may find it hard to get a good answer to this question on /r/AskHistorians.
Firstly, school curricula and how they are taught vary strongly between different countries and even different states. Additionally, how they are taught is often influenced by teachers having to compromise on how much time they can spend on any given topic. More information on your location and level of education might be helpful to answer this question.
Secondly, we have noticed that these questions are often phrased to be about people's individual experiences but what they are really about is why a certain event is more prominent in popular narratives of history than others.
Instead of asking "Why haven't I learned about event ...", consider asking "What importance do scholars assign to event ... in the context of such and such history?" The latter question is often closer to what people actually want to know and is more likely to get a good answer from an expert. If you intend to ask the 'What importance do scholars assign to event X' question instead, let us know and we'll remove this question.
Thank you!