What If..? The Importance of the Hypothetical
ByIf history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.
~Allen Nevins
What If? It’s a question that few minds can escape from. We ask that question on a personal level almost daily. But what if you extrapolate that question to some of the biggest events in history? That’s where historians come in. Shocking, historians aren’t just keepers of the timeline. Even celebrity historians like David McCullough and Stephen Ambrose have written about the hypothetical in a book aptly titled, What If?: The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. facenews, out of Bakersfield, CA has put together 9 of their favorites on their site. My personal favorite: What if Pontius Pilate had spared Jesus? How different would the past 2000 years be?
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