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.
I've got a couple of books for you. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm intrigued. Tell me more.
DeleteRobert Harris. Fatherland. New York, NY: Random House, 1992. Published in the UK first. Set in Germany in 1964, but a Germany which is involved in a nuclear cold war with the USA. A former U-Boat captain is now a criminal investigator in the SS, and one wet morning he gets called to look at the dead body of an old man who's been fished out of a lake in one of the elite suburbs of Berlin....
ReplyDeleteIt's a terrific book especially as all the action takes place in three days. It's a believable picture of Germany as it might have been, including the "pernicious negroid wailings" (as the Nazis call them) of the Beatles being beamed into German territory by the Voice of America and being jammed by the Nazis. Utterly worth a look. It's a massive sidetrack but the single incident which changes the course of the war is that the Germans find out that Enigma has been compromised and so they change their codes.
ReplyDeleteRobert Cowley and Stephen E. Ambrose. What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been : Essays. New York: Putnam, 1999.
ReplyDeleteI like this - it's a whole series of essays and vignettes of turning points in Military History. Fir example Winston Churchill was knocked over by a New York Taxi in 1931 but survived - what might have changed had he died? Also apparently Annie Oakley shot a cigar from the mouth of Kaiser Wilhelm in 1889 when he unexpectedly volunteered to hold the cigar - something her husband usually did. How different might things have been then? It's full of intriguing twists and turns from ancient times to the 1980s.