For a more subtle change, I’d like to live in a universe where Jim Henson decided to go to a doctor to get 0his sore throat checked out rather than try to work through it.
Perhaps not obscure, but interesting: what if Operation Mincemeat, in which the Germans in WW2 were fooled by fake documents found on a dead body, hadn’t been successful?
That’s an interesting one, as it could even have ended up shortening the war, if the Scilly invasion had been a failure, or at least much more costly than the Allies predicted, then maybe the invasion of Italy would have been abandoned in favor of an invasion of the Balkans?
Which, while it could have led to a worse quagmire thm Italy, at least had a viable target to aim for, the Romanian oil fields. Which would have led to a much more serious response from the Germans and so more troops would have been diverted from the Eastern front.
One of my favorite counter-factuals involves the Battle of Chapultepec. If Santa Anna had positioned his forces differently, the battle could have been a very bloody one for the attacking American forces. Casualties would have been much higher. Or possibly fever/disease could have run through American forces. Imagine US History if any of the following people had died there: Franklin Pierce, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall Jackson, A.P. Hill, George Pickett, James Longstreet, P.G.T. Beauregard, Joseph E. Johnston, Rafael Semmes…the list goes on.
I thought there is discussion of giving Helen back, stopping the war, and going home. Not avoiding the war to begin with.
Or if Kaiser Frederick III had had better doctors* to evaluate and treat his sore throat and “catarrh”.
With a much longer reign by a politically liberal (for the time) Kaiser, his son Willy would have had less time to do damage and WWI possibly could have been avoided.
This is a fine and excellent distinction to draw, and brings us full tilt into the realm of Death of the Author: Achilles’ flaws are there to be seen; Achilles is held up as the epitome of a glorious hero. Is this in fact a criticism of heroism, is it meant to be a price worth paying, is it solely a modern reading that sees his egotism as a flaw…
In any case,I still contend that the Iliad casts a long cultural shadow and I am really interested to hear peoples ideas for cultural touchstones which, had they been interpreted differently,would have had a notable effect on the world centuries downstream.
You’d be hard put to find one more influential than Illiad, possibly Shakespeare, though the point being made there is usually pretty obvious, I can’t think of any Shakespeare plays where the interpretation is that much in doubt (but I never studied English Lit past age 16 
)
One contender is Machiavelli, there is the theory that holds that rather than meant to be taken as actual advice for wannabe amoral tyrants its actually closer to Steven Colbert (the character on the Steve Colbert show, that is) and is satirizing the amorality of political leaders not advocating for those policies.
But as with the Illiad has The Prince actually caused any amorality among the political leaders of the ensuring centuries? Or did it merely put into words the attitudes of the people jockeying for power, then and since? If it had been recognized as a satire for its existence would any politician have acted differently?
Oh. No, I don’t remember that (caveat, it’s been quite a while since I read it.) What I meant was that the massive damage caused by war, and that it’s caused by men’s pride, and that it’s what they’re proud of that’s often destroyed but they go into war even when they know and expect that: all that’s in there.
But it has very much a tone of ‘all this is unavoidable, it’s just the way men are.’ Whether there would have been anything else in the lost books is I suspect unanswerable.
Agree, other than some popular misapprehensions about the Wars of the Roses I’m not sure there’s any big changes in people’s worldviews that can be attributed to Shakespeare.
I wrote a very bad undergraduate dissertation on the reception of Machiavelli and there was a very strong counter-reaction because he was the first to come out and say that morality/theology had or ought to have no influence on statecraft - a position which at the very least punctured certain cosy myths. OF course, any even vaguely perceptive analysis of how actual rulers actually ruled at any point in the years between, say, the Council of Nicaea and Machiavelli’s time would have shown the same thing, but it was Not Done to actually say so.
Accepting that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, it’s arguable that The Prince had the effect of negating the need for tribute - rulers could avoid even the fig-leaf/honoured in the breech adherence to Christian morality they’d been required to show in the past by casting themselves as Machiavellian realists.
A world in which there wasn’t quite so much scope for treachery and massacre as tools of statecraft, or at least not without at least a social/cultural penaly might be a better one?
I suspect candidates for cultural change are less High Literature/Art/Music and more popular culture (in which I am going to include popular reception of Christian doctrine).
E.g. a lot of women could have been spared unnecessary suffering had the Malleus Maleficarum never been written, or by Genesis being rather more even handed about whose fault the whole apple-eating incident was. Medieval mystery plays might be a good target for our notional time-travelling editor.
Preventing the writing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion would also be worth a shot, one feels.
Oh if you are going down that rabbit hole we’ll be here all week
Preventing the writing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion would also be worth a shot, one feels.
True, though I would go with preventing the invention of anti-semitism. Which was consciously invented in the late-19th century as a way of rebrand anti-Jewish discrimination from being about religion (which was no longer really considered OK, in the sophisticated educated circles in northern Europe) to being about race (racism being not only OK, at the time, but very cutting edge “science”).
On a (much) lighter note, if we are going with “ensuring something that was completely made up, is treated that way rather than being considered non-fiction”, I’d like to see the cultural results of that happening to the article that invented disco (the most influential popular music movement in history, possibly excluding Rock and Role, or maybe Jazz), which was in fact completely made up. The underground disco scene of the time was nothing like what we know of as “disco”, being part of the NY gay scene, and closer to style of 90s rave than what we know as disco. Tracking down underground music scenes being quite hard work the author decided to stay at the hotel bar an make up his article based on his knowledge of the Mod scene in the UK. What would have happened if he had been rumbled ? (or had taken the time to go to an actual disco?)
I’m not sure if these are obscure enough, however, I often mull about these:
What if the coup against Gorbachev hadn’t occurred? He seemed sufficiently reasonable and pragmatic that I think the west might have been able to incorporate Russia into our gang or club or whatever (and I don’t mean in some sort of imperialist/conquest kind of way).
How about if Nixon had not decided to engage China.
Or if the 1919 peace talks gave the Arab world autonomy.
Another one, based on an Irish history podcast I was listening to recently:
What if the Reformation had taken root in Ireland?
A major aggravating factor in relations between England/Scotland/Britain and Ireland was that (after a couple of wobbles) the people on the bigger island were officially and mostly Protestant, and the people on the smaller one were not. This drove a lot of prejudice (superstitious, backward Papists etc.) and fear (our Catholic enemies in France and Spain will use Ireland to stab us in the back). The question of Catholic Emancipation, for example, was a major barrier to Britain relinquishing power in Ireland.
So… what if there were loads and loads of Irish Protestants? In positions of cultural and economic power? Who saw the British as fellow travellers and allies against despotic European Catholicism?
I don’t quite know how Protestantism would take root in Ireland - you have to overcome the lack of urban centres, the relatively better relations between Church and people, antipathy to anything that was too obviously English - but skating over that minor detail, even a more established Protestant minority, let alone a narrow or dominant majority would have affected relations in a generally positive manner.
(And, you know, the social and moral hegemony of the Catholic church in Ireland well into the 20th Century was a source of misery for many, so an opportunity to duck that is all to the good.)
AIUI, religion alone wasn’t the sole source of difference and grievance: perceptions of language/ethnic superiority and the consequent economic inequality had a lot to do with it. I have the impression that the implantation of Protestant settlers, whether Elizabethan aristocrats or Jacobean merchants, wasn’t intended to convert the native Irish.
One other possible counterfactual about Irish history: what if the Easter Rising had never raken place and the Home Rule Act (or Dominion status) had gone ahead (albeit with a supposedly temporary exception for the North? What if that exception hadn’t had a separate parliament for the North? Granted, that assumes plenty of key players not doing what they were always unlikely to do.
Oh absolutely, it’s certainly not a one dimensional conflict. But religion did loom large and served to intensify other the factors you mention, so it’s interesting to speculate on how much difference it would have made to have had a commonality instead of a schism, so to speak.
Super Bowl XLIX, Russell Wilson throws the ball away instead of trying to throw the ball to a receiver that was triple teamed. Marshawn Lynch, who had been virtually unstoppable the whole game, runs the ball in for a touchdown on the next play. New England has 32 seconds left to try do something.
A possibly minor one: what if Edward VI had been a healthy, robust kid and didn’t get sick. Would he have changed history? Or-contrawise, what if he’d been stillborn?
Or if he’d had just a couple of extra years to marry Lady Jane Grey and produce a Protestant heir?
Also: if the heirs apparent who died young had lived - Henry VII’s Arthur (no Henry VIII!) and James VI/I’s Henry (no Charles I!)…
Or if Henry VIII had had a male heir or two with his first wife?