800-1600 North American What If’s

North American history prior to the arrival of the permanent European colonists in the 1600s remains in the vapors. We know about major cultures such as the Inkas and major events such as the smallpox epidemic that wiped out 90 percent of the Native American population. Imagine how the continent might easily have developed differently. …

1600s – 1900 North American What Ifs, Excluding US Civil War

In the approximately 300 years between the arrival of the first permanent European settlement and the emergence of the United States as a global power at the beginning of the 20th century, there are at least 13 'what if's," slender threads, seeds of alternate histories, not including the US Civil War. 1600s What If Mayflower …

1500s: Protestant Reformation, Spanish in North America. Defeat of Armada. What If Questions

The 1500s were a critical century of dramatic social change -- the first where historians have detailed documentation of what went on, due to the invention of the printing press. "All the winds of doctrine were let loose upon the earth," as the English scholar John Milton famously wrote. Gutenberg/Printing Press --->Luther-->Protestant Reformation-->Wars of Religion …

500 A.D to 1400 A.D. Dark Ages or Early Middle Ages. 7 Videos, 3 Essays, 30 Questions

The period after the fall of the Roman Empire in the late 400s until the Enlightenment beginning in the 1500s has traditionally been viewed in the West as the Dark Ages, in which very little social progress was made, with few inventions, little exploration, cultural isolation, the spread of terrible diseases like the Plague in …

BC: 2000+ Years Ago Influences Us Today

Can Guns, Germs, and Steel Explain Human History? 3-hour Video Series. What Ended the Bronze Age? Did Cleopatra’s Nose, Henry the VIII’s Libido, Richard III’s Horse and Your Ancestors’ Luck Make Crucial Historical Differences? Most Important Break-Ups in History? Without Herodotus and Thucydides, Historical Analysis Would Have Started Later, If At All. Could Alexander the Great Have Ruled the Entire …

0 to 500 AD: Ancient Empires. 9 Short What If Videos

Studying ancient empires and discovering their relevance for today is not an easy task. Cody Franklin’s "What if" video series does a pretty good job of making them relevant by speculating on how the world might have changed if the victors were different, or if, for example, the Roman Empire never fell. Ancient History What …

Without Wars, the World Might Be Worse Off

In the above video, John Green of Crash Course "talks about whether humanity is naturally warlike, hard-wired to kill, or if perhaps war is a cultural construct. John will talk about the Hobbes versus Rousseau debate, the effects that war has on human social orders, and the effects that war has on individuals. So is …