What brought me to your site is our mutual enthusiasm for the works of Harry Turtledove, which for me is recent. I began with the first volume of Settling Accounts. While waiting for The Grapple to come out I backtracked into American Empire and only now have begun The Great War series I just finished American Front). I have been taken in by the story lines and the characters. Turtledove’s premise is all too plausible and I am more than a little glad not to have to live in it. It would be bad enough to share a 2,000 mile border with a single hostile power, but also appreciate having Canada and the UK as our friends. I would also miss having baseball as a major sport. I wonder also where he intends to take this timeline after the final volume of Settling Accounts is published.

I find that alternate history not only requires an understanding of actual history (which Turtledove demonstrates) but offers great insight into it.

Your description of Washington as ‘Disneyland on the Potomac’ is great. Of course I think that the man in the White House (I make it a point not to use his name and ‘president’ in the same sentence) is living in Fantasyland if he thinks his strategy has any chance of succeeding. I fear that more death and carnage, both of American soldiers and mideast people will result and in the end we shall need to with a number of even more extreme and hostile regimes.

Let’s try this as an alternate history scenario. Imagine if the British Prime Minister (his name escapes me at the moment) had risked having his government fall by declining to enter WW I. He might have saved a whole generation of young European men, the victims of the flu pandemic, the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution, the rise of Hitler, the holocaust, the Armenian genocide, WW II and possibly even the great depression. Virtually all of the wide-scale suffering and destruction of the 20th century resulted from the events of 1914. Just a thought

Moreover, if you have the intellectual “heft” to manage it you should, just for fun, tot up the number of major figures in the Civil Rights Movement, both Black and White, who were (are) Southerners.

Then, you should try counting the number of Black elected officials today in the former states of the Confederacy. Oh yes, don’t forget Doug Wilder.

Then you might try toting up the aggregate GDP today of the states of the Confederacy. If you’ve actually read and understood Turtledove, don’t forget to include Maryland and Kentucy. Just for fun, throw in Missouri, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. Now, compare the total economy to the economies of recognized nations states today.

If the higher math hasn’t yet got to you, try counting the number of Americans Abe Lincoln killed in a war that began for no better reason than to satisfy his own vanity. I’ll save you the trouble: It was 623,000, give-or-take, with more than a million more wounded. That’s more than in all of Americaq’s other wars combined — about 250 times the number killed in Iraq.

If you can manage to read an entire two volume work, read the memoirs of James Dunwoody Bullock, Confederate Commissioner in England, and favourite uncle of Theodore Roosevelt. Don’t skip the part where he was authorized by the Confederate government to offer to abolish slavery in return for British recognition and military support.

Finally, if it won’t tax you too much to keep reading actual history rather than pot-boiling fiction masquerading as “alternative” history, read Jay Winik’s 2001 work entitled “April 1865″. Don’t skip the part about the plan to offer freedom to all slaves who joined the Army of Northern Virginia and for their fasmilies.

Now that you’ve finished those ezercizes, and if your mind hasn’t been completely blown by the higher math and actual history, please move inside the Beltway. You’ll feel much more at home.

Cheers,
Luther Hardy
Richmond
Comp. G, 9th VA Cavalry
Army of Northern Virginia

6pence

P.S. to Cornelious Vandall: some of us are more interested in the substance of the issue(s) being debated than the typographical quality of the post.

More attention to detail will increase confidence in your
opinions.

Cornelious