I do see your point; we naturally got our share of British history, too (that's how I found out what the ingrates did to Bonnie Prince Charlie. )

The thing is though, if a nation's a world power the odds are good your country has to deal with it regularly, so it's a good idea to know about the parts of its past that had a large and continuing effect. The alternative can be tragic: One of the OTHER things I learned about in history class (courtesy of a video of a former Secy. of the Air Force) was that when the Allies were partitioning Korea they couldn't find a convenient geographic boundary that equally divided the country, so the Americans just shrugged and said, "How 'bout the 38th parallel?" What they didn't know is that one of the causes of the Russo-Japanese War was Russias desire to divide Korea at the 38th parallel. The unfortunate consequence is that the Russians took our suggestion as a sign of capitulation, when it was nothing of the kind, and the rest, as they say, is history. Which can often be very important.