It is my experience that Americans often don't know history. When I was a graduate student, I taught an undergraduate course in the history of religion in Europe, and pointed out the parallels between the killing of Stanislaw Szczepanowski, Bishop of Krakow, by Boleslaw of Poland and the killing of Thomas Becket a century later. I said that history can repeat itself. A student said, "Once as tragedy and once as farce." I asked if he knew the source, and he didn't, nor did anyone else. So I gave them the opening lines of Karl Marx's "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon", "Hegel says somewhere that history tends to repeat itself. He forgot to add, once as tragedy and the second time as farce."

I wasn't surprised that no one knew the meaning of "Brumaire" (a month in the French revolutionary calendar) or about the coup d'état on the Eighteenth Brumaire of the Year VIII that put Napoleon into power. What did surprise me was that no one knew who Louis Napoleon was.