Steele Brand

We don't know of anyone before who said, what if this would have happened?

Now it's

In popular circles, it's all the rage.

Video games, it's all the rage.

Like, what would have happened if this, that, or the other had happened?

In some scholarly circles, the fact that Livy is asking an alternate history, it's kind of annoying.

Historians aren't supposed to do that sort of thing.

But I think Livy is absolutely spot on.

I think that a historian always has to be thinking in terms of an alternate history.

And here's why.

I don't think you can do good history unless you understand the question,

what if this hadn't happened?

So if I'm going to teach a class, I'm going to teach a class about Alfred the Great, like the greatest statesman to ever live.

And I teach the class and everyone already knows the outcome in my freshman class, where I just presume that everyone's going to figure out what happens.

Oh, that's no good.

But if you can put someone in the shoes of Alfred the Great, you can put someone in the shoes of like, oh my gosh, he goes into exile, he loses, Anglo-American civilization as we know it is doomed.

If you can put them in that situation,

then they'll really feel what it's like to be under the attack by the Vikings.

Or they'll really feel what it's like if you are Hammurabi and you're beset by all these people and you're not going to be the guy that's the main base of the Middle Bronze Age.

But that's not how it happens.