If it hadn’t been for other groups moving through and pushing, the Slavs would have hung around their original area near Kiev.

Real Prussians, the cousins of Lithuanians, not the Germans who moved in later, got nothing again. That’s always the way – the farmers get occupied and their land gets traded among the people with weapons. [My name, originally spelled Doemke, is Prussian, not German, and my great grandfather spoke Prussian, as well as German. He was always ranting about Prussia.]

Well, Americans just don’t appreciate how “sacred” every square inch of the country is for national pride. Given the state of surveying and map making for most of history, I have a hard time taking ancient land claims seriously.

Even in the US, the site in the West that is identified as the “Four Corners” where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet, is not the original point as specified by Congress when the states were formed, but it has become the legal boundary by virtue of court cases and the wording of state constitutions.

Of course, the Mississippi has accomplished a few land swaps between states as it has changed its mind where it wants to flow over the years.

Old grudges are apparently too refined for American sensibilities… well, except for one. 😉

The humorous thing about Europe is that it’s been 70 years since the Soviets invaded Poland, and the Poles *still* hold a grudge about the fact that the Soviet successor states are sitting on what used to be 1/3rd of Poland, despite the fact that they got all of East Prussia and a bunch of East Germany in return. They’ll probably still be grumbling about that a hundred years from now. It’s like the Middle East in that way, where thousand year old grudges are still in play.
.-= last blog ..It took 20 years to get Medicare passed =-.

That was repayment for the Poles and Lithuania sitting on a major chunk of Russia for a century or so, a while back.

The Russian Empire ruled a major chunk of Poland throughout the 19th century. I just did some research for a friend that involved an ancestor who was a Pole, born in what is now Lithuania, who moved to what is now Poland, and emigrated to the United States from what is now Russia, but never left the Russian Imperial Governi/province that he was born in until he left from a German port in what is now Russia. Every town had four names: German, Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian. All official papers had dates in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars.

Poland was constantly being partitioned. It was a European “board game” for centuries. If nothing else was going on, they would partition Poland.

– Badtux the Geography Penguin

True, but other than you and I, how many remember history?

It is a major difference between Americans and the rest of the world, that we seem to ignore the past. When I hear someone talking about “the Founding Fathers” or see them utilizing symbols from the Revolution, my first reaction is to see how badly they are mangling what actually happened or was said.