alt Hacker News> Even in our modern world where history is taught and movies and books are abundant, few people have any idea of who conquered whom in 1620 AD and what were the consequences for their distant ancestors.
This is just wrong, people are typically very well aware of the history of the area they grew up in. If you ask people in Sweden if Denmark once ruled Sweden, I'd bet around 99% of Swedish people would say yes. That ended 1523, they probably wouldn't know that exact date but they would know it happened for sure, people joke about that all the time. If you ask people in Finland if they were once ruled by Sweden, I'd bet 100% would say yes. If you asked exactly what periods people will be shaky, but they will know Sweden once ruled them and then Russia did rule them.
I think everyone goes into detail about their home area in the 9 years you study history in school, at least what happened the past 1000 years since that is recent and well documented, studying every single recorded war and rebellion for the area you live in is normal.
And the consequences? You can see them all over the places, you see the language changing, you see cultural connections everywhere with the conquerors etc, even hundreds of years later. Even today you have remnants from Mexico owning Texas like Cathedral of San Fernando, people wouldn't think USA built that with such a name.
Even USA does this, although its history doesn't stretch 1000 years back but the wars USA was in I think are well known by most Americans. And this goes for states as well, I'd doubt you would find many who grew up in Texas that doesn't know it was once a Mexican province and was conquered by USA. People in New York might be more shaky about that, but that's because the war didn't really affect their area.
People know relatively recent history of large nation states because we live in the post-Gutenberg era and we live in an era where vast majority of people do 12 years schooling at a minimum (a quite recent phenomenon). You can read, the vast majority of people in human history could neither read nor write. So people largely relied on oral history. How many Swedes can tell you about the various tribes that made up the oroginal identity of Sweden itself? Would a modern Swede think about the Götar, Upplänningar, or the Värmlänningar? These tribes occupied Sweden before the Swedish national identity emerged somewhere between the 1200s and 1500s. Unless they're history buffs probably not, and there are countless others for which we have no record of.
Many areas of the world existed outside the bounds of extensive record keeping. Thousands of tribal identities and city-states were absorbed into the modern day nation state. Even Germany did not exist as a country until 1871. At one point there was 300 principalities in the region now known as Germany.
The Cathedral of San Fernando was built by the Spanish in 1738, not Mexico. Mexico didn't exist as a nation state until the establishment of the First Mexican Empire in 1821. Meanwhile the Republic of Texas was founded in 1835, just 14 years later, as it broke off from a Mexican dictatorship. The Texans were wise to keep around beautiful and historic works from the Spanish and even retain the names of many Spanish established cities (although they might pronounce them differently as in Amarillo).
Texas wasn't conquered by the U.S., it was a sovereign republic for 10 years before the Texans voted to join the U.S.
Either way history is extremely complex and even as we know so much there is a lot that went undocumented and is lost to the ether. There are many cases where entire cultures were assimilated away, by the Romans and otherwise.