alternatehistory.com

Inspired by this blog post:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2017/05/03/spell-c-l-h-o-u-n-across-steel-grey-sky/

After retrieving my eyebrows from the ceiling, my next thought about Trump’s comments was that it might serve as a kind of writing prompt. There’s a fun alternative history that might arise from this idea of what if Andrew Jackson had been born a generation later?

Pondering such a thing risks falling into the kind of “great man” errors that Trump falls for here, but to me the interesting part is trying to re-imagine the Jackson Era without Jackson. We could imagine a different outcome in the Seminole Wars, thus giving the Underground Railroad a southern destination and perhaps creating a very different Florida, with a possible alliance between Seminoles and former slaves. Maybe President Clay grants it statehood sooner, and on those terms. Meanwhile, in Georgia, the growing presence of a vibrant community of Cherokee Baptists — not decimated and displaced by Jackson in this timeline — might just mean a different trajectory for the Baptist conventions of the 1840s. …

As for Jackson himself, I’d have him born 50 years later in this alternative timeline, as Trump suggests. That will make him just 19 years old, in my story, when he dies at the Alamo.

Imagining the Jackson Era without Jackson could be a lot of fun.


So - does this inspire anyone to imagine the America of such a timeline?
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