What historical event do you think would have changed history if it had turned out differently?

[MaryQueenofKnots]

Here's mine:
What if Edward VI had lived?
What if JFK hadn't been shot?
What if Edward VIII hadn't abdicated?

What if any of the great plagues hadn't occurred?

It curious because we are going to see it in real time... in the last 100 years we have almost irradiate plagues (mini epidemics and massive pandemics). Covid would have been a huge 'population reset' one but we stopped it.

From a humanitarian point I don't want people to die obviously but from a scientific point I find people arguing over gas cars and plastic while not considering nature desperately tried to kill off over 1/4th of the population of earth and we deliberately stopped it hilarious.

The survival of nearly 2 billion extra people and their future input into the world will change more than arguments over 'stop oil' etc...

Having less children won't fix it either. That simply creates a destabilized society causing health and finance crashes (far too many old, not enough young to function). Some countries like South Korea are seeing this issue already.

@TheTripThatWasnt and others, You get a brief overview of UK history in "This Sceptred Isle" by Christopher Lee.
My next step was Wikipedia. and YouTube,

I remember listening to that on radio 4 in my 20s- it was good bought my eldest it on audio cd from amazon.

From the BBC website

I have recently wonder why Edward the Black Prince wasn't marriage much earlier as would be more normal especially as he was on battle fields by mid teens.

He finally married at 31 and in end chose his own bride and his parents had to lump it - she was royal cousin and had difficulties around marriage - she married secretly then been married off by her family and first husband had to appeal to Pope for her return.

I mean I know they couldn't foresee his early death though illness but he was in peril on battle fields a lot - if his heir had been a decade plus older would have meant his father handing crown over on his death to an adult or near adult not a ten year old child - who history claims then let his position go to his head - so maybe whole War of the Roses could have been avoided - though plenty of other events could have gone differently as well to avoid them.

This is the one that first came to mind for me too, @bluetongue Incredible story!

I struggled to stick with watching 'The Man in the High Castle' too, despite with finding it interesting to start with.

I do find all the comments about Hitler interesting too, I feel like if he hadn't come to power then someone else quite bad might have filled the gap - antisemitism was rife even before his rise to power and there were also a lot of communist leanings. Perhaps if the reparations at the end of WW1 should have been less severe because that was ultimately what started the downfall of the German economy/society.

I often wonder if there could have been a post war settlement which was less harsh than dividing Germany in two, or at least if it could have been a fairer division. The West was 'let off' much more lightly than the East.

It always makes me roll my eyes when someone says that sooner or later nature always corrects and a massive game-changing event takes place to force a reset and rebalance…. It DID- and we turned the entire world upside down to minimise the impact.

What if it had been invented earlier, e.g by the classical or Hellenistic Greeks?

Mine too. And if the Cuban missile crisis had turned out differently.

What was moral about picking a city, which turned out to be Liverpool to experiment carrying out a managed decline? Or the Hillsborough cover up? It plunged people into poverty, meant that grade 1 and 11 buildings had to be demolished and at the same time drug use was allowed to spiral. Let's not forget ger best friend was Jimmy Savile, her and Prince Charles made him untouchable. She knighted Cyril Smith after he was exposed as a pedophile. She blocked Peter Hayman from being named and protected other pedophiles. What personal values and principles were at play there?

And if the Cuban missile crisis had turned out differently.

Many of the documentaries I've seen on it suggest it very nearly did.

Printing press is an interesting one - as without it literacy rate in Europe probably wouldn't have increased and the associated spread of ideas not happened. The telegraph in Victorian times and train travel also shrunk the world and kick started all manor of changes - though they came off the back of industrial revolution and it's precursor the agricultural revolution. Many of the information disseminating technologies have kicked started so many other changes.

Usually they were observed having sex on their wedding night in front of officials - going back years and the birth was witnessed and child ‘sexed’ by mutual people - this only stopped fairly recently - the observing and being present at the birth but it does still go on to prevent this. C of A would have either have periods (witnessed by multiple people who washed cloths etc) or didn’t bleed at all (menopause) either would have been well known. There are some that say that Henry was infertile and Catherine’s daughter was not his and Anne Bol was her brothers - rumours were rife. I bet they wouldn’t be doing ancestry online to find out if it had been available.

I’ve had two friends recently do a DNA analysis to find out grandparents weren’t who they said they were. One work colleague has both parents die and was an only child only to discover through her parents papers that she is her mothers child but not her fathers - her father has fathered at least 200 children he’s a doctor in Harley street - biological father says he did it to help childless couple and won’t meet or correspond but literally gave thousands of sperm bank donations - her mother mentioned fertility treatment at Harley street but never ever that her father wasn’t hers, it’s a whole can of worms for work colleague who only found out less than a year ago and no one can answer questions. Scarily when at university she was dating a guy who has now been discovered to be her half brother. Literally hundreds of them.

Presumably Hitler was one of the (thankfully) extremely rare personality types known in ‘the trade’ as a ‘malignant narcissist’. I dare say Pol Pot and Stalin would also have fitted the description.

Anyone interested in Hitler’s rise to power should read The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich, by William L. Shirer. The author, who also wrote A Berlin Diary, was an American journalist present in Berlin during the pre war 1930s and during the early part of Ww2.
After the Nuremberg trials, he was given access to literally hundreds of tons of papers the Nazis hadn’t had time to destroy.

There were meticulously detailed (and utterly chilling!) reports of meetings, Hitler’s rants, and all communications within Germany and to and from other countries.

It’s a massive but fascinating read. A very fat book - I’ve got it on my Kindle.

Something I’ve never understood about Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon’s failure to produce a male heir- why didn’t they just cheat?

Privacy in court circles wasn't really a thing - they were constantly watched - and Henry did cheat a lot plus Catherine was very religious.

TBH I'm slightly more surprised she wasn't quietly poisoned by someone between point Henry stopped sleeping with her - possibly due to birth injury or her age - and publicly trying to divorce her. I assume her attendants must have been vigilant and very loyal and Henry himself still fond of her and court had some scruples.

Henry VIII did have bastards with mistresses so wouldn't have assumed he was the problem - his eldest bastard was married before he died aged 17 and some historian's think Henry may have tried to put him on the throne if he'd lived.

The later baby in the warming pan - was a convenient fiction for Mary and William to take the throne from Catholic James II and made up by his enemies.

@ConnieCroydon , If we (English) had valued Ireland so that they didn't want to separate or if the mass of people had not sympathised with IRA against Devalera. Unfortunately we had Churchill who tool a almost personal stance against Irish Politicians. It mad the Protestants in the north so much more intransigent.
We lost any benefit from some great writers and intellectuals.

Good tip, I enjoyed a really detailed book on the atomic bomb recently by Richard Rhodes

Just showing how we ended up with Hiroshima

Really well written

Adam and Eve. Should have left that fecking piece of hanging fruit well alone.

C. of Aragon did have sons, they just didn't survive.
What if Henry Fitzroy had lived, & claimed the throne?

What if indigenous Americans had resistance to typhoid, smallpox, etc? What if they had colonised Europe instead of Europe colonising them?

Well its not historical its theological but I'll bite:

No, women should have been subservient and abused forever under coercive control... the fact the first two women both defied god because he was treating them shit and where forever punished for it does not saying anything bad about the women but rather god.

Tragically, today's Tories do treat the public purse as if it's their own money... except it means spending like there's no tomorrow and giving it away to their family/mates.

This.

Republican crackpots want to talk about a stolen election, then this is what they should focus on.

The SC giving an election to one party and then confining their ruling to the facts of that case to avoid repetition.

No war in Iraq, no fake wmds, and a us leader focused on sustainability.

See also the dems treatment of bernie in the primaries using super delegates when bernie won the popular vote.

It would have happened somewhere else. Antisemitism was absolutely rife in the early 20th century Europe and actually Ukrainians slaughtered 100,000 of their own Jewish people in 20 years before WW2 even began. They were blamed for the turmoil of the Russian revolution. The Holocaust was so destructive that people buried their anti-senitism, but not for long. Once again anti-semitism is one of the most prevelant and disproportionate forms of racism today less than 80 years since 6 million Jewish people were murdered, and as always it’s a very scary time to be Jewish