Hypothetically, if governments wordwide just suddenly became authoritarian and deleted all records of history, how much history can you recall from memory to re-teach to the next generation?

The government doesn't control all the information. I'll still have my offline copy of Wikipedia, on my phone, that contains a lot of the world's history. Apart from that I just remember some mythology, some stuff about the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Incas, British, Americans, and Indians, plus a reasonable understanding of WW2 and the holocaust, plus various historical events that have happened in my lifetime.

A lot less than I think I could

That’s the ending of Fahrenheit 451!

For me, the risk is remembering things that are factually wrong. With no one to correct me, I would be worried about getting stuff wrong the whole time

"Look kid, all you need to know is that up until 2016 the world was simpler, but then they killed a gorilla which lead to the rise of fascism in 2025"

This is why books are so important. Real, physical, paper books. The scenario you are proposing is precisely what Fahrenheit 451 is about.

I’d remember that the Undertaker threw Mankind off the top of Hell In A Cell and through the commentator’s table.

This is not much of a hypothetical scenario. History is being written with a bias or outright misrepresentation and has been forever.

I literally have multiple copies of Wikipedia offline. Including one on a USB stick.

I don't think it would ever be possible to delete all records of history short of blowing up the entire planet at which point its quite moot.

rotates chair to glance at collection of hard copy encyclopedias & encyclopedic dictionary

Me personally?

A lot but summarized to hilarious extent. Example:

So mosses was like “guys I found a stream!” And god was like “the fuck you find?” And Moses was like “I mean god provided me a stream”

God was like “yeah it’s fine… the book i gave you described me as a chill god right? Not a jealous vengeful god… this is totally settled”

Then they arrived at the promised land and god was like “you can all stay here! Except mosses… he can fuck off to the stream he totally found”

Anyway my point is it wouldn’t be one person remembering all of history. It would be like f 451 where everyone remembers one book or one bit of history.

The clear soda craze was the defining point of the 1990s. That's about it.

I have a stack of Encyclopedia Britannica in my parents storage.

I could probably recite Bill Wurtz's "History of the entire world i guess". And go into some more detail if someone asked.

Quite a bit actually as I'm a history nerd. But, it would come bits and pieces at a time because that's how my mind works. Even if I sit here thinking about even Americas history, I'll leave holes in the story, and like a week later, "oh yeah this should have been part of that" so I'd have to write it all down in notes and compile it later to write a book, only then would I be able to teach anybody. Because nobody's learning much by riding my train of thought.

Also the TV show friends will never be spoken of again.

There were Romans (basically Greek cosplayers), some dude with elephants who may or may not have been a cannibal. Then some dude got nailed to some lumber for trying to tell people to chill and love eachother. A few thousand years of fighting about that. Columbo sailed to India but found Aztecs instead. The cubs finally won... And that about brings us up to date.

big bang - earth cooled - life appeared - life evolved - dinosaurs at some point ended by meteor - small mammals survived and evolved eventually to apes - apes evolved to early homminids I think going roughly authrolopithiciens to home sapien with many intermediary homos in there like habilis and interpred with another branch neandrathal (cro magnum is in there somewhere maybe after anthropolicicien). During all this evolution brains got bigger and things like art, tool use, language, and fire use became a thing. Early religion and ritual developed around birth and death and likely day to day essential activities. We came from a scavenger back ground but our tool use became weapons and we started to hunt. Over time we more and more intentionally started to plant seeds and keep animals which became farming. This lead to our species becoming less nomadic and as we started to stay in one location we started creating more robust shelter and infrastructure which lead cities and tribes becoming states. Earliest large ones we know are out of the middle east but kinda expanded west. Sumer to babylon to egypt. Then north. greek - roman. Expansion continued with a bunch of stuff in asia and europe and in between and surprisingly trade managed to flow across the known world while on the other side of the world in america you had a lot of folks sorta leading simpler lives but there was the inca empire. We think humans evolved in africa and spread out from there and at some point crossed to america during an ice age that created a land bridge. man this is long im tired. history over.

My head is full of episodes of Ancient Aliens. I should probably just stick to teaching English if I had to teach anything.

I wouldn't bother with history at that point. History only matters when we can rely on there being a future. And if the big oops happens, all that matters is raw survival and STEM (with the pure M being optional).

So... US History, I've got you:

Okay, in 1607 we started a colony in a place that would later be famous for having a lot of racists. For about a hundred years we were happy fucking over Native Americans, then people wanted to stop paying taxes, so we had a war with England. We won, with a lot of help from the French, but we don't give them much credit. We spent another 3/4 of a century fucking over Native Americans, building shit, and importing slaves, mostly from Africa. Then we had a Civil War about the slaves, killed each other a bunch, and in a huge surprise that no one saw coming, the part of the country that had all the industry won. We set the slaves free, so we could continue to treat them like crap. Then we went back to fucking over Native Americans, built a bunch of stuff (some of it was pretty cool), and started fucking around with the rest of the world. We started bringing in immigrants when things got shitty in other parts of the world, because we needed people to expand and someone else to be prejudiced against. We had some economic issues because some people wanted to be really rich, I'm sure taxes factored in there somewhere, but we pulled ourselves out of that with a couple of big wars and then we sorta took over half the world. We went to the moon, and appointed ourselves as "all around cool guys", although there were still a lot of issues with minorities and a big fracas about civil rights that some folks still haven't gotten over. But we thought we had to be tough guys to keep the USSR from making communism a thing, so we kinda ignored all that and started spending money on nukes and proxy wars instead of going to the moon. Rich people decided they didn't want to pay taxes again, and Reganomics mindfucked a generation of people into thinking you can run a country anywhere other than right into the fucking ground that way. After the Soviets made a mess of their half of the world and fucked off, we decided that things were too quiet and really started fucking stuff up in earnest. We pissed off a fresh batch of people in the middle east, because oil, and just kinda stirred the shit pot everywhere else because we were the biggest kid on the block. We also started the habit of surveilling everyone after some terrorists attacked us. Some of what we did might have been helpful, but there's so much chaos and so many pissed off people now it's hard to tell. Fast forward and some of us have figured out that we're causing problems, but we're neck deep in the sunk cost fallacy and busy letting people continue to promise us they can run the country better if rich folks pay less taxes.

TL;DR: It's taxes all the way down.

When it comes to American history, I could do American independence - present day. Most public education stops at world war 2, you never really learn about Korea or vietnam. You might learn about the civil rights movement during black history month, but it wasn't well covered in my school. I was born in 1979. I've had to educate myself about stagflation that happened in the 70, along with the geopolitical events that helped stagflation, which includes british and american usurping iranian sovergnty to install a dictator that looked favorably upon capitalists oil interests, which brought me to the iran hostage crisis, which eventually gave way to a war between iraq and iran and the contra scandal. The shit Reagan and his officials got up to is insane, and Reagan managed to maintain enough deniability and have fall guys to keep from being impeached. There was a halfhearted attempt with H.Res.370 — 98th Congress (1983-1984) to Impeach President Reagan of the high crime or misdemeanor of: (1) ordering the invasion of Grenada, in violation of the Constitution and certain treaty obligations; and (2) preventing news coverage of such invasion. There was another attempt for the contra scandal. I'm old enough to remember the Berlin wall coming down. I lived through Kuwait, Iraq invasions, Tiananmen Square massacre, 9/11 and the bin laden hunt, Clinton deregulation of telecoms, yugoslavian civil war, 2000 dot com bubble recession, 2008 housing bubble recession, covid, and trump installed as president to enable facism/techno feudulism . . . we didn't start the fire.

Archive.org

IIT: People who don't understand the premise.

I got this, I watch dr. stone

I probably can't remember much aside my own countries history, and even if I wouldn't be able to give exact years and such. Luckily the whole of English Wikipedia (text-only) is roughly 100GB so I would probably distribute the records or requested articles via the black market. Also, this is basically how people in Cuba get access to internet content.

War, no rights for most, war, war, more war, fight for rights (for everyone who wasn't an old, rich man) worldwide, more war, we got rights granted for a lot of groups, and now in the big 2025 they're being threatened because of said old rich men

You underestimate the amount of history books i have. Plus the entire wikipedia

I can recall the gist of European history from year 900 through 1850ish. Then in a lot more detail after that. Outside of Europe my history knowledge is mostly a subsection of European colonialism.

Don't need to remember all that much as I still have a bunch of old dead trees that are porting that knowledge for me.

Decent amount, but I would get a lot of details wrong.

This topic is a perfect example of “The Breakfast Question” in action.

Are there really this many people that struggle with hypotheticals?

"Ok kids the last 5000 years were just an endless string of dick waving contests. They said that we had to knew history so we wouldn't repeat the same errors of the past but that was a fucking lie. Now who's up for some science?"

Why bother? It repeats itself, yes? Fuck that. Start fresh.