Yes and yes. It is embarrassing how ignorant even college-educated Americans are about any kind of history, especially world history. I think much has to do with upper education encouraging specialization over liberal arts, resulting in many students taking a minimum of history classes.
I have always despised the political propaganda against smart educated voters, coded as academic elitism, because I know they are encouraging Americans to be stupid sheep. I know plenty of intelligent people who have never attended college, but those people are people dedicated to autodidacticism and life long learning.
We are an intelligent people, because somehow we have built a country with a mindblowing diversity of cultures and ideologies covering a land mass that is 3/4’s the size of Europe, and we have been able to live in relative peace. But to maintain the peace in our country we can’t allow our governments to go on auto-pilot, Americans need to wake up and start analyzing their news, and studying socio-political and world history so as to become more politically savvy and active.