The Alternate History Project

Recently two broad historical topics have been quite prevalent in my mind.

The first is the Gilded Age. I'm getting closer and closer to teaching a chapter about it, so I've read the chapter and made a few notes and such. In addition, I've been reading up on it from outside sources including a whole book on the time period and a whole book on the Chester Arthur.

The second, and more relevant to this post, is alternate history scenarios.

This is an extremely broad topic. It covers everything from George Washington isn't elected unanimously by the Electoral College in 1792 to John Wilkes Booth gets away, meets Chester Arthur's wife, and plots to replace Chester Arthur. However, the second category of vast changes to the timeline are uninteresting to me.

Two major groups of alternate history are what I enjoy. First, I find interesting the scenarios of slight, believable change to what happened. For instance, it is a slight, believable change to have Samuel Tilden win the Election of 1876. (To be fair, our timeline has the unbelievable scenario...)

Also in this group falls presidents who died not dying, or some presidents who did not die actually dying. Examples include the assassination attempt on Andrew Jackson succeeding, JFK not being assassinated, Warren Harding surviving his full term, and Chester Arthur dying of Bright's Disease while in office.

The second major group I enjoy is placing a president at a different point in history. You've had small tastes of this one with the Presidential Super Tournament, the two "What would (President) do?" posts, and some other sprinklings here and there. However, most of these have put presidents into modern times. What about moving Millard Fillmore to 1880? That's just as interesting a scenario, if not more interesting, when making considerations.

And so you probably wonder why this is referred to as a project in the blog title. Well, it's the next big gimmick. All... I'm not even going to estimate how many people are reading my blog anymore... of you get to decide what alternate event I get to take a more in depth look at. Poll will open tomorrow with 4 possible choices. It'll last for a fortnight, then I'll begin research and be done in a fortnight after that.

God help us all.