That's a very good point. I suppose we are (in-part) products of our envrionment.
The history that I learned in elementary & high school focused first on American history - colonial times through WW2, some on Wisconsin (my home state), and very broad brush study of Euro-centric world history. My one grandfather and the rest of my great-grand parents came from Norway, so that gave an extra direction to my interests. In hindsight, notably absent: Native American histories (North & South), Asia, Africa, and very limited study of the foundation cultures of the west (take your pick of culture). Once I got to college, the horizons expanded for both study and travel. That's probably fairly typical for many - not all - of the American posters & readers here. I imagine each of us has a different format that our education followed, but we tend to be more connected to the historical drivers on our own individual cultures.
That's the fascination of this site for me. I find that if an Alt timeline catches my interest, I go back and do some "homework" on the historic situations that provide the points of departure.
Fair enough. It is quite normal that people are the partial products of their environment, especially in topics of formal learning (which history eminently is). But in this case, the environment is made of a lot of other people, past and present who collectively have made choices about what bits of history are considered relevant to them in a relatively arbitrary way. This is important (and I actually teach this to my students when the topic arises) since that contributes a lot to collective self-definitions. The US seem to me a fairly good example, in that European history is collectively considered more relevant than the Native American one in most of the US formal teaching (correct me if I get wrong this point). On the other hand, I am under the impression that in many places, it would not be possible to disregard "Western" history to same level to which, say, Indian or Chinese history is generally disregarded in most Western history teaching. Likewise, I believe that Western non-specialistic history curricula (in their numerous varieties) tend to operate fairly limited selection on the cultures "at the origins of civilization" that are worth even a mention, according to a sorting of present relevance that is far from random or neutral. I find interestingly odd that Italian textbooks give almost no notice at all about Mitanni, Elam, Urartu and the neo-Hittite and Old Aramean states. The "erasure" of such an important culture as Elam is particularly puzzling to me. Ebla is sometimes mentioned in passing only because the archaeological mission that found it was Italian). I would also guess that a similar situation applies to most Western countries. This is historically understandable, but I still think that it is useful to note that.
Some blind spots are obviously caused by such kinds of selection.
There are also structural blind spots. For example, our knowledge ot the Iron Age Near East is skewed toward cuneiform-writing societies and groups (except of course Hebrews), as opposed to Phoenicia and the Aramaic world, among other things because the latter favored more perishable writing materials than clay. Hell, some older stages of Aramaic appear better documented by findings from Egypt, whose dry climate preserved papyri, than from the Fertile Crescent where Aramaic was actually the dominant spoken and written language!. This sort of things makes some bits of history objectively more knowable.
