My Favorite Historical Things

It's impossible to prioritize, so here it goes, in no particular order.
1. The Salem Witch Trials

1691, Salem Town, Massachusetts. A band of girls begin exhibiting strange symptoms. In modern times, they would've been shipped off to a psychologist, given a diagnosis, then shipped off to a psychiatrist, given some pills. But here it's the work of the Devil.
Over the next few months, the Afflicted Girls, as they were called, accused hundreds of people of cursing them. Nineteen were hanged and one poor fellow was pressed to death. But if you ask me, the real victims were the girls. They had to live with the guilt for the rest of their lives, which for the most part were spent in the same small town. They never even had an answer for why they did what they did. Mass hysteria? Tourette's? Just peer pressure? Modern historians are still throwing guesses. Sometimes it's just easier to blame it all on the Devil.
Plus, I have a personal connection here. I recently discovered my great great great great great great great great great great  great great aunt, Susannah Martin, was hanged for witchcraft. That's doesn't stop me from pitying the Afflicted more than the Accused.

2. The Titanic

Who doesn't love this? There's so much contrast. The wealth and glamour of the upper deck passengers, the huddled masses down in steerage. The ridiculous amount of money spent outfitting the ship with things like cigarette holders. Meanwhile, there are nowhere near enough lifeboats for the passengers. Why has the Titanic gone down in history? Name one other famous shipwreck. Heck, name one famous ship.
The Titanic didn't bring America into war like the Lusitania or the U.S. Maine. It wasn't a vessel of discovery like the Santa Maria or the Beagle. It didn't do anything but chug halfway across the Atlantic and die.
There's something haunting about tragedy. The shipwreck could've easily been prevented, and that, combined with the contrast of wealth and poverty, has given inspiration to countless books, plays, and movies.
Sometimes, you don't have to impact the world to be remembered. You just have to leave a legacy.
3. The Romanov Assassinations

Moving clockwise: Tatiana, Olga, Tsar Nicholas II, Anastasia, Alexei, Tsarina Alexandra, and Maria

Their family may have owned a sixth of the globe, but the Romanov sisters never had a room of their own. Olga roomed with Tatiana and Anastasia with Maria. They made their own beds every morning. Still, they were raised in a bubble. The Romanovs lived a life of luxury while Russia teetered on the brink of revolution. Eventually all seven of them were assassinated, along with some of their servants. Their bodies weren't found until many decades later, and when they were, not all of them were together. The Romanov's killers buried Alexei and one of his sisters separately to help hide their crime. Scientists disagree over whether the missing girl was Anastasia or Maria. In 2007, the missing bodies were recovered, though we still don't know which sister was separated. One thing's for certain: the only member of the Romanov family who survived was Joy, Alexei's spaniel.

4. The Industrial Era

Battlefields and assassination sites get preserved for future generations of third graders to visit on field trips. But the untragic side of history, the mills and factories, they just get abandoned and crumble. The Industrial Revolution was really the tipping point of human history. Life was no longer measured by the rising and setting of the sun. Clocks made everything precise. Instead of waking up "at dawn", you had to get to work by 5:00 A.M. You could travel by rail instead of wagon, which led to the invention of time zones.
And again, we see the contrast beneath the rich and the poor. The silk dresses and satin underwear of the rich was made by shoeless children working for two dollars a week.
Plus, it's also when we got the Newsies.


5. World War I

They called it The War to End All Wars. But today, we mostly look at it as a precursor to World War II. This is the first modern war. We started off on horseback and by the end we were dropping bombs from airplanes. It changed the way we think of fighting itself but no one ever talks about it. The National Mall doesn't even have a memorial for the 116,516 who gave their lives.

Don't Kill Hitler

Whenever I talk about time travel with my friends, someone says that they'd like to go back and kill Hitler. "That way World War II will never happen."
Friend, meet Brick Wall. Would you like to bash your head into it or should I do it for you?
Killing Hitler would in no way stop World War II. You'r forgetting that it was a world war. We've still got Italy and England and France and Japan and Russia and so many other nations involved. Even if we could pull Germany out there would still be war. And why would erasing Hitler get rid of Germany? Someone would take his spot. With all the chaos going on in Europe they'd be dragged into the conflict as well. We would still have battles. We would still have concentration camps.
You know, Hitler gets all the blame and glory. Sure he is (mostly) accountable for killing 11 million people in concentration camps. But there were other camps around the globe. When was the last time you talked about the Lithuanians deported to Siberia, the Indonesians put in Japanese camps, and heck, the Japanese camps here in America? Granted, those weren't quite death camps, but they're not happy places either. Why do we want to kill Hitler? Why not Mussolini or the Hirohito? Or FDR? Or Winston Churchill? You could end the war, but the side you like may not win. Why not knock off Einstein? Sure, the atom bomb ended the war. But it's still a tragedy. Admit it, you don't want a happy ending. You just want your team to emerge victorious.
And who says we have to stop at dictators? If we can kill Hitler, who else can we knock off? When a serial killer shoots eleven people it's a tragedy. But that's not eleven million. Is it worth it to trade one life for eleven? For a hundred? For one?
Even if you can get a time machine and come up with a practical way to approach this, there's still the tricky business of shooting the man. He survived 42 known real life assassination attempts. Some of them by a very narrow margin. Most of them carefully calculated. How are you going to get close to the guy? He had ridiculous security as a politician. Do you want to kill him as an infant? "Sorry, Mrs. Hitler, I need to borrow your baby for a minute. Bang! You're welcome."
 
Say this works. Hitler is dead. Someone else is in power, and that guy shoves a few people into concentration camps, but not so many. Different people die in battle. Different people are spared. Let's say...fifteen million lives are saved. How many descendants do they have today? And what have they been doing? How many politicians lost an election to the grandson of a would-be holocaust victim? How many of them cured diseases, resulting in a million more saved lives? How many of them spread diseases and eliminated another million? How many of them designed new cars, new kitchen tools, new weapons? How many of them started new wars?
We like to think of history as a parade of politicians and generals. But it's not. Wars are won with soldiers and nurses and spies and bullet factory workers. Elections are won by voters. You want to destroy a politician? Kill their campaign manager. Kill their PR director. Kill a talk show host who had an opinion.
Any event that changes history is part coincidence and part cooperation. So if we do develop time travel sometime soon, let's not kill Hitler. Let's study history first hand. Let's save shipwreck victims and bring them to the present. Let's take pictures of our great-great-great grandparents.
Time is an infinite stream of change. One bullet wouldn't change the world nearly as much as we think it would.