Is it not common knowledge in the UK...

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..who Abraham Lincoln was and that he was assassinated while attending a play during the end of the Civil War?

I only ask this because I was watching this interview on Conan with Brian Cox who is a physicist from England who is fairly familiar to anyone who watches the Discovery Channel or The Science Channel.

It just seemed like either a naive or cheeky question to be asked by a world renowned professor, and then I realized that may only seem funny to egocentric ears in american culture.

-Professor Brian Cox On Teleportation-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFy87tFTZwY

Ahh, the effects of a comedy-show green room. Green rooms are the holding pen for guests on a radio or television program. The comedic variety of green rooms are notoriously stocked with booze. There were several problems with ready alcohol when Johnny Carson hosted The Tonight Show. Certain guests ended up gassed, which either made for memorable humor, or complete disasters.

In this case, the poor bloke was simply tipsy and got wrapped up in the moment.

And, yes. He must have missed that day in school when Ford's Theatre was explained.

That's interesting .. and crafty, I've never heard that before. I don't actually remember where I absorbed the fact that Lincoln was a president or what a president was or that he was assassinated, just that it was sometime in the primordial stage of memory before 1st grade.

The standard of historical knowledge among the UK population in general is pretty abysmal, and that includes knowledge of our own country's history. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the majority knew nothing about Lincoln, but then they probably know nothing about important British 19th century figures like Palmerston and Gladstone.

I don't think Cox's response proves much - he was probably just caught on the hop by an unexpected question amidst all the craziness and reacted instinctively. But I doubt that he has a particularly impressive intellect: regrettably he typifies many modern British "media academics", tending to dominate the TV programmes and documentaries he presents, and focussing on a gimmicky or patronising approach in order to make his subject matter appear accessible and "cool".

Over here most people's knowledge of Clinton revolves round the Lewinsky business, Reagan is the old Hollywood cowboy actor and Kennedy is the guy who got his head blown off. If you went a bit further back and asked the average punter about F.D. Roosevelt, most of them would be unable to make an association with the New Deal or even the entry of the USA into WW2.

Likewise, hardly anyone under 45 knows anything about Prime Minister Clement Attlee, whose administration from 1945-1951 was, in its own way, every bit as important as that of Churchill from 1940-1945.

It's funny in a way, but also quite depressing.

I probably know more about the US than I do about my own country, and that's pretty sad. For example I only learned from a children's book a couple of years ago that the Boston Christmas Tree is sent from Nova Scotia all the way to Boston as way of thanking the people for helping the survivors of the Halifax Explosion, which I also knew nothing about until the 90's when they started showing those Heritage Minutes PSA's on TV.

Most people in Canada know who Honest Abe is, but a lot of them don't know what the little sailboat on the back of our dimes is called - it's the Bluenose, and being Nova Scotian I was pretty sad and disgusted to read about people not knowing or even trolling what is basically the icon of my province.

Also pretty much every kid in Canadian schools know who George Washington is but they never talk about all the Canadian soldiers who fought and died in war in the states.

I'm a bit surprised that Brian Cox seemed to be slow on the uptake there.Maybe it just depends on what subjects people
are more interested in,but the level of general knowledge in the UK is indeed surprisingly poor,even about the UK itself.
Personally I'm interested in a wide range of subjects so I not only know about Lincoln but I'm also aware of some curious coincidences between his assassination and that of Kennedy.
Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theatre. Kennedy was shot in a Ford Lincoln car.
Both were succeeded by vice-Presidents named Johnson.
Both assassins had the same number of letters (15) in their names.They were both murdered before going to trial.
The surname of Kennedy's private secretary was Lincoln.

Dr Brian Cox is a very smart and educated guy, but this is something not particularly well covered in UK schools unless one goes on to specialize in US history. Each country has enough to handle just trying to teach its kids about their own country's history. Not everything can be covered in basic high school, in either the UK or the US, concerning another country's history.

In my British high school we just about got into the explorers, the "discovery" of America, and on up to the Boston Tea Party. and even then, it was all in the context of what it meant for our history and our role. Because, mostly our history lessons had to catch us British kids up on thousands of years of our own history, and any sidetrack into another country's history was expressly because it tied into a moment in our own.

At high school level I would imagine that's what all countries respectively have to do in order to keep a handle on things.

I don't think I found out about the finer details such as Lincoln's assassination in the theater until I was a grownup with an interest in documentaries on history and all kinds of other subject. My autodidactism gave me more about stuff like this than I got in school. Also a plus is the fact that the United States was something of a special interest of mine since a young age and I also lived there for most of my adult life, so now I have general knowledge from both nations that normally a regular person wouldn't know regarding either unless they had sought out that information.

Brits don't really know about US stuff but usually will have all the UK stuff crammed into them in school. There's no particular reason why Cox doesn't have that assassination in the forefront of his knowledge base as he's not an American and it's not something people in the UK even give a lot of thought to unless it's an interest of theirs. Most may know Lincoln was killed, but not about the details, thus the "theater" reference will mean nothing to them. Just like a great many things about British history is not something Americans are taught unless they take it on in specialization in their education.

Really I just think neither country can get that far into another country's history because they have enough to handle just trying to get kids' heads wrapped around their own first.