Basket.

Well, so alternate history fiction is not so bad after all, but in my opinion good, thick history books still absolutely rule the damn planet. Of course, lots of people are going to disagree with that; you know where my tagboard is.

A combination of alternate history and fiction based on alternate history has somewhat roused my interest in how the world might have been different today either if a) The United States had lost the War of the American Revolution, and thus never come into existence, or b) The Confederate States of America had won the American Civil War, thus successfully seceding from the Union.

I realise after all the reading that those two conflicts are in actuality severely underrated. The world needs to know more about them (in spite of the anti-American sentiments most of us bear, with some good reason to), simply because both had hte potential to greatly change the history of the United States and with it, the entire course of Modern World History.

Can one imagine what the US would be like if Great Britain had managed to keep it a colony (perhaps for a century or two more) instead of losing it at the Paris Peace Conference in 1783? Or how World War II, and the Cold War would have been if the North American continent contained three countries, two of them mutually antagonistic, instead of just two, friendly ones? Hell, the entire 20th century would have followed an utterly different course.

What will send shivers down some spines is how close both came to happening. The birth of the United States itself was something of a miracle. The British had more, better-trained and equipped troops, and in many battles of the war soundly thrashed the American colonists. Only the incredible strength and ability of George Washington, coupled with a healthy dose of luck on quite a number of occasions, prevented defeat and continued British rule. The war itself can be said to have been unnecessary; the British had earlier in the 1770s, presented a detailed and conciliatory peace plan with many concessions to the colonists. Had they accepted it, which seemed to be the sensible thing to do then, the US would have remained a colony. And who knows for how long?

The American Civil War was an equally close-run thing. In 1862 the Union forces were being beaten back by the able Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and the European powers were on the verge of diplomatic recognition of the Confederate States of America, something that would have spelled the death knell for Lincoln's attempts to keep the USA as one nation. Then by a stroke of sheer dumb luck, Union soldiers out foraging found the complete Confederate battle plans for their upcoming offensive. Such an amazing stroke of luck gave the Union Army commander George B McClellan a chance to win the war; he wasted it, but did good well enough at Antietam Creek ("the bloodiest day of the war") to halt the Confederate advance and force a retreat. The strategic (if not tactical) victory completely changed the political situation, and the European powers hung back, never to grant diplomatic recognition. The war went on, and the government forces eventually won to hold the Union together.

It could so easily have been the other way around. With two mutually hostile states where now there is one, or with the USA staying under the thumb of Britain for another century or two more, there would have been no superpower on the American continent, and there probably will not be now. Who knows what the world might have been through in the last hundred years and look like today if that was so? Definitely very, very different.

"What we do in life, echoes in eternity." Hackneyed as this phrase must sound, it is very true indeed.