TICONDEROGA, N.Y. (AP) – In history-challenged America, the French and Indian War is that brief grade school lesson between the pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock and the Shot Heard “Round the World.

To get a grasp on the nation’s birth, however, Americans must first realize how the war triggered the events leading to the American Revolution, said Fred Anderson, professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

“If you start thinking about American history with the Revolution, you lose the fact that that’s really the midpoint of American history,” he said. “If you lose what comes before that, then you lose the period when Indians made the most difference in American history.”

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the start of the war that pitted the British and some of their North American colonists against the French and their Indian allies. It’s being commemorated with lectures, re-enactments and other events from Virginia to Maine. “George Washington Remembers,” a new book on Washington’s reflections of his French and Indian War experiences, was recently published in conjunction with a new exhibit at the Fort Pitt Museum in Pittsburgh.

And a four-part PBS series scheduled to air in the fall of 2005 – “The War That Made America” – hopes to do for the French and Indian War what Ken Burns’ popular documentary did for the Civil War.

“I think we did the French and Indian War in about one day” in school, said Eric Stange, producer of the new series. “I think that’s what most people learn. Without this war, the Revolution never would have happened they way it did.”

A generation of Revolutionary War heroes and villains – among them Washington, Paul Revere, Daniel Boone and Benedict Arnold – received their baptism by fire during the French and Indian War. The new taxes that would spark a rebellion by the American colonies were an effort by the British to recoup the costs of the French and Indian War and to pay for governing their expanding North American empire.

And it was after the French and Indian War that the colonists began thinking of themselves as Americans instead of British.

In the end, what started out as a dispute over the Ohio Valley in the 1750s would overshadow in importance of the military campaigns being waged across Europe during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). Winston Churchill, who knew a thing or two about global conflicts, called it history’s first world war. The fighting in the North American theater of the war is known as the French and Indian War, the last in an intermittent series of conflicts between France and Britain for control of the New World.

This was primarily a frontier war notable for the wave of violence it unleashed between whites and American Indians. The stories of torture, scalpings, murder and massacres committed by all sides remained seared in the American psyche as settlers continued the push westward.

“This is such a brutal conflict and it goes on for so long, it makes Indian hating possible in more ways than it was before,” Anderson said. “You begin to find people who don’t discriminate between friendly Indians and enemy Indians, and they just want to kill them all.

“It’s a terrible legacy.”

Like later world wars involving the British, the French and Indian War starts off with a string of military disasters. They include:

•The 22-year-old Washington and his Virginia militia surrendering to a larger French and Indian force at Fort Necessity, near present-day Uniontown, Pa., on July 4, 1754, in what many historians consider the first battle of the war.

•Gen. Edward Braddock’s expedition to capture the key French outpost at Fort Duquesne, now Pittsburgh, nearly being wiped out in July 1755.

•The infamous Fort William Henry massacre, in August 1757, after the British garrison on Lake George, N.Y., surrenders to the French, whose Indian allies go on a rampage.

•The defeat here of a large British-led force in July 1758, when the defenders of the French fort at Ticonderoga, outnumbered 5-to-1, mow down hundreds of redcoats making an ill-advised frontal assault.

The British defeats are exacerbated by their inability to form widespread alliances with Indian tribes. While the French successfully court tribes from the western Great Lakes to Quebec, British failures on the battlefield and arrogance around the council fire alienate most potential Indian allies.

“The French are conscious of Indians as partners,” said Anderson, who edited the Washington book and wrote “Crucible of War, The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766.”

“In the English setting, they’re thinking of Indians as people occupying land that English farmers would like to have,” he said.

The British begin to turn things around in the late 1750s. Political changes in London shift policies in the colonies, where the provincial governments are given a bigger role in the war. The English finally win the support of the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, the six Indian nations who control a vast area from Lake Erie to the Hudson River.

With more tribes defecting from the French, the British capture fortifications on Lake Ontario, Lake Champlain, and finally, on the St. Lawrence River, where Quebec City falls in September 1759. When Montreal falls a year later, the war effectively comes to a close.

At Quebec, considered one of history’s most important battles, Gen. James Wolfe defeats the French on the Plains of Abraham outside the city walls. Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm, who led the French in a string of victories at Oswego, Lake George and Ticonderoga, are killed in the battle. The fighting lasts for another year before Britain’s superior naval forces choke off any hopes of relief reaching Canada from France.

The Treaty of Paris, signed in 1763, formally ends the Seven Years’ War. In North America, France hands over Canada to British control.

The French aren’t the only losers. Scores of tribes aligned with France now find themselves facing a British government that considers Indians a financial burden, not a military asset.

“Indians were vitally important in deciding the outcomes of conflicts in colonial America,” Anderson said. “They were a factor in balancing one empire off one another and made sure the wars between France and England were never decided.

“But once the Seven Years’ War ends with the elimination of France from North America, the Iroquois, in particular, lose the ability to balance one empire off one another. That means it’s a whole new ballgame.”

With France out of the picture, the British take control of a vast portion of the continent. But the economic burden of fighting a global war and defending its newly won North American empire nearly bankrupts the British Crown. In the 1760s, London imposes taxes on the colonies to cover the costs.

“It’s only then that the colonists feel like the rug has been pulled out from them,” Anderson said. “This war that they fought and bled in, and paid for, is all of a sudden being turned around on them.”

That sense of betrayal simmers among the colonies for a decade before exploding at Concord and Lexington in 1775, the opening shots of the Revolutionary War. The Americans, led by an older, wiser Washington, win their independence from the same British who led the successful fight against the French and Indians a generation earlier.

“Here you’ve got the biggest victory in British military history,” Anderson said. “It enlarges the empire by a huge amount, and the result is that it breaks the empire apart.

“Sometimes victory can be bad for the victor. It certainly was in that case.”

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On the Net:

French and Indian War 250 Inc., http://www.frenchandindianwar250.org

Fort Pitt Museum, http://www.fortpittmuseum.com

Fort Ticonderoga, http://www.fort-ticonderoga.org

AP-ES-06-19-04 1440EDT