Initially I thought that pondering the "what if's" of history was a passing fancy or a fun game to play, especially with other history geeks. But the more I delved into such questions, the more I realized they provide a whole way of studying and sparking interest in world history. Seeking answers to "what if" questions -- what if a certain event did not take place or turned out differently, what if certain individuals made different decisions or took different paths? -- are essential to understanding and explaining history.
I now ask myself such questions to spur personal interest in the history of parts of the world that I have never visited and know little about. "What if" questions get to the heart of the significance of events or historical periods.
And when you apply "what if" questions to the biographies of great or significant people, you have an almost infinite number of questions to ask or an infinite number of key moments, thin moments or points of divergence to identify. The questions make history come alive.
So, now, alternate history or the possibilities that life could so easily have turned out differently for all of us has become a subject of lifelong study, and a whole way of looking at history, freed from unquestioning, facile, implicit beliefs in "destiny" and "pre-destination."
Standing next to an ancient city wall in "Muslim" Istanbul, Turkey, on the Asian side, just a 10-minute boat ride across the Bosphorus Strait from "Christian" Europe, I began to ponder the global historical importance of these walls. What would have happened if these walls had not held...if, for example, Christians had succeeded in dominating the Middle East and North Africa until the present day, or conversely, if Islam succeeded in dominating Europe until the present day?
We in the West think of choosing religions almost completely as a personal choice -- a decision one makes to believe or disbelieve. And yet, history and culture play an enormous, unseen role in individual choices. One's religion is often determined by accident of birth. If you're born in Turkey or most of the Middle East, odds are you're going to be a Muslim, culturally if not devoutly. If you're born in Italy, odds are you're going to be a Catholic, culturally if not devoutly. If you're born in America, odds are you're going to be a Christian, culturally if not devoutly, and specifically a Protestant, as 50 percent of Americans identify as Protestant. although America is increasingly a land of religious (and irreligious) diversity.
The more I traveled -- to Vietnam, Cambodia, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Austria, the Gulf States, Egypt, Ireland, Scotland, England -- and the more I studied, the more I realized we humans are creatures of history and culture. I could think of multiple "what if's" for each country -- critical moments or turning points that led to terrible, bloody tragedies or almost miraculous transformations.
What if the walls of Constantinople hadn't held repeatedly through Byzantine history? Beginning with the attacks of Attila the Hun in 447, Western Europeans (and consequently, America) might be Muslim today.
"It's worth pondering on the significance of the effectiveness of the Lands Walls of Constantinople," wrote Terry Richardson in Today's Zaman in 2010.
"If Attila had breached them in 447, would the city have survived as a Christian entity or would the eastern half of the Roman Empire (later known as Byzantium) have collapsed? The Byzantine Empire is seen by most scholars as an effective barrier between the Islamic world to the east and Christian Europe to the west. But had Constantinople, capital and lynch-pin of this great empire, fallen to the besieging Arabs in 717-718, would the tide of Islam indeed have flooded its way across to the Atlantic and left Europe a largely Muslim continent? This is pure speculation of course, but there is no doubt that this incredible defense system played its part in determining the course of world history."
In my mind I began to ponder alternative histories for the whole world.
One inspiration for writing this blog was when I realized I could trace my ancestry online back to the 12th century and check my DNA, which hinted at the unique decisions made by hundreds or thousands of individual ancestors going back to the stone age. We carry our unique ancestry with us through our DNA, and this got me to ponder how I, like all of us, am a creature of history.
Upon learning my DNA, I began to place my own ancestors' stories in the context of the specific places they lived in America and Europe and actually world history, how they were buffeted by wars and revolutions, famines, epidemics, religious conflict, political change and economic turmoil. I began to reflect on the "slender threads" that connect the fabric of my own life and fortune to theirs.
What if my great grandfather x 10 had not by chance met and married my great grandmother x 10, way back in the 1500s? I would not exist, none of my ancestors for the last 500 years would exist, and none of my descendants would exist.
It's almost an example of the butterfly effect. Human history, or at least your human history and my human history, are like the path of a tornado that can be altered by the simple flapping of the wings of a single butterfly and the direction it chooses to fly.
One of the inspirations for the "Slender Threads" blog and book were when I discovered that a B-52 bomber carrying two four-megaton hydrogen bomb crashed near Goldsboro, North Carolina on January 23, 1961. Miraculously, neither bomb detonated. I was a small child living in rural, central NC when this crash happened, so this report startled me.
If the bombs had exploded, one hundred thousand people in or near Goldsboro -- probably up to Raleigh -- would have been incinerated, thousands or possibly tens of thousands would have become refugees. There would be no electricity on the East Coast of the U.S., during a bitter cold spell. Tens of thousands of people would likely freeze to death.
And it started me to mull over other other moments when history stood still or time held its breath. And I gradually began to realize that there were an almost endless number of such slender threads in history.
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