Alternate History

What if the Nazis had won WWII? The Confederates the Civil War? What if Kennedy hadn't been killed in Dallas? Some historians decided to ask those questions at some point, and authors decided that they would answer them. Since the days of Ancient Greece people have been creating scenarios where things went a little bit differently, like if Caesar hadn't surrounded himself with traitors, or if Washington's army decided to wait before crossing the Delaware, all with mixed results. Some altered events were shown as having been a disaster to the original "winning" side, while others made victories come faster or immediately. But how can your students use alternate history to help learn more about historical events? It's simple; it teaches them to study how history happened.

When you a give a student a single event, they can only look at it from the point-of-view you put it in. Let's say Johnny was assigned a topic on the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Johnny would know that it was a battle in the Civil War between the Union and the South, and it was the Union who successfully drove back the South and stopped foreign powers from supporting the CSA. But what if you asked Johnny what would've happened if the Union didn't drive them back? In books like Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee and The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove, this question is answered: the former mostly shows how Pickett's Charge was actually a success, Britain helped the South, and the CSA now exists with the USA past the Mason-Dixon line and into South America; the latter gives us the vision of how the South would've massacred the North with AK-47s brought to the past by future apartheid sympathizers. As unrealistic as they are, it's what historians do; they'll ask questions that would seem unlikely of ever occurring, and have them occur in a simulation.

If you have your students read these books, it can actually expand their thinking further. Now they can see, as unrealistic as many of these stories are, how little changes could change an entire section of history as we know it. It gives them the mindset of one who has to ask questions in order to better understand why things went the way they did. A historian can ask the questions and cross each of them off as they come to an unreasonable thing having to happen in order for it to work that way. it also helps craft how one could "predict the past", or prove what would have happened differently. You can find a million stories out there detailing how Kennedy would either have become a dictator or leader in peace had he not died, but we can never be sure. Basically, alternate history sharpens students minds to question history, and look at it from every angle to see why things happened the way they did.

At the end of the day, no one's going to be remembering the actual outcome of the Civil War. They're only going to be thinking about how the introduction of modern technologies to the South could've led to big problems or peaceful solutions (Turtledove's book actually explains how even with independence, the CSA would have eventually gotten rid of slavery). Either way, at least they'll understand why they lost at Gettysburg. Hey, there may even be an alternate history where this blog was never made; a history I would never want to live in!

-Pharoah Noh-Tyep