Picture a history where Adolf Hitler won WWII. On a
different path, 300 Spartans and 1000 soldiers from other city-states did not
hold the Thermopylae Pass long enough for Greece to marshal an army. In another
world, Abraham Lincoln was not assassinated. Thinking about those other
timelines and how our present could be different has kept me distracted
throughout my studies of history (much to the chagrin of my professors).
Most of the time, history is considered as a strict
progression of events. However, I think of it as a progression of
possibilities. These possibilities arise from watershed moments of history.
Watershed moments are points in which the events of the time changed the world.
The moments can be big, with clearly defined and immediate consequences; or they
can be small, with more subtle and far-reaching results. Sometimes changing
them simply alters the path to the same conclusion.
For several years now, I have played a game in my
head – a “what if” game. How much effect would changing a watershed moment have
on the events that followed? In what ways would the present be changed by those
events? Through a combination of research, reasoning, and imagination we can
begin to speculate on the possibilities of history, rather than the results of
it.
Whenever I have studied history before, I have had
to work at not getting sidetracked. This time it is the point.
