That’s history. When James Michener, the famous story teller, was at the University of Texas he was quoted as saying “everyone in Texas is a historian.” I have found that to be especially true here in Calhoun County where our local history is so deep. It would be even deeper if the Indians had done more than write with smoke signals or leaving arrow heads around bays.
One of the interesting things about history is that we often think the way it happened as inevitable. Another is the way we tend to judge history by the norms of current times what happened in the past. Neither, of course, is necessarily correct.
What would the country be like if the South had won the civil war? Certainly it would now be different. It was shaky as to who would win at the time they were fighting. There was a strong sentiment in the North, especially after the South won so many battles early in the war, to negotiate a peace and have two separate countries. The reconstruction after the North won would have been different if Lincoln had not been assassinated..
Historians and authors like to ponder those alternate histories. Many books of that sort have been written. Some are about the past history some about the future. We tend to call the future stories Science Fiction where authors take a trend that is prevalent currently and projects what could happen if it continues.
Alternate stories about the past make an assumption about certain key events going the opposite direction than the way they went and project what sorts of things might have unfolded. It is certainly fun to ask yourself the question like what would have happened is LaSalle had actually found the mouth of the Mississippi instead of Pass Cavallo in Matagorda Bay. Would the Spanish, in Mexico have been as interested in developing our Texas?
Those thoughts are not the only thing fascinating about history. Once a long time ago in a conversation about facts and truth I made the comment “the only thing we know for sure is a historical fact”. The historian I was talking to gave me a long lecture about how I was misinformed. He agreed that there were several single things that we know like who won what battle. However, there were vast fluid and unknown details in-between those known events.
We do know that those who win or survive are the ones who write the history. We know that the Tudors won the War of Roses in England. And as a result Shakespeare painted Richard III, who was a Plantagenet, as a villain in his play. But when the English found his bones and interred him recently the story was painted with a different brush. The interpretations of the spaces change over time. Heavens to Betsy we still might be a British Colony if we hadn’t won that war. That we would become an independent nation was not inevitable.
