Yes, he was a racist by today’s standards, but he was also a devotee of logic, reason and humanity. He was not afraid to change his mind when new facts became apparent to him.
I wouldn’t say Oliver Cromwell died young, per se, but if he had had a few more years to establish the Commonwealth as a viable form of govenment, we might have seen a very different Britain over the past 400 years.
Napoleon II, the possibilities are limitless!
Well, if Henry Frederick, the older son of James I, hadn’t died when he was 18, he would have become king and probably would have been a much better and more popular king than his younger brother, Charles. So then Oliver Cromwell wouldn’t have had to do anything.
There’s just so many, and who knows what sort of world we would’ve had had they lived.
One obvious one that occurs to me is if Mary I of England had managed to have a child with Felipe II of Spain. That would’ve neatly knocked her sister Elizabeth out of the running for the throne, and England could well have remained Catholic.
If Baldwin IV of Jerusalem hadn’t contracted leprosy and died so young, the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem might’ve survived another hundred years or so. He was a brilliant king, and given a healthy body and a couple more decades he could’ve achieved great things.
Some people (a lot of people) won’t consider the possibility that Jesus was anything other than perfect, never made a mistake, was never subject to random chance. Some even think he could reanimate the dead and change the molecular structure of matter.
It makes them happy to think about this, and happy to be dismissive of any rational view to the contrary.
Bobby Kennedy dithered too long, and wouldn’t have gotten the Democratic nomination.
Or there’d have been a civil war that would have made the Wars of the Roses look like a Thanksgiving family argument over Obama.
If Lincoln had lived he probably would have had hell to pay in getting any Congressional support. An irony I’ve thought of is that he may have actually had southern politicians as his greatest allies (in exchange for returning them to Congress).
This and I think he’d have overseen a much more moderate Reconstruction focused more on physical and economic repair with a much lighter touch on political reconstruction; possibly under the direction of Johnson, who’d already affected reconstruction of Tennessee before the Republicans drafted him into the vice presidency in 1864. While Lincoln’s strong leadership may have restrained the Republican agenda and delayed the 14th amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (which certified the American citizenship of freed slaves), it might also have worked to prevent or reduce the later Jim Crow era by forcing a national reconciliation that was much less punitive to the South.
Exactly. The true, historical Jesus spoke of peace and love, but modern worshippers frequently use his name as an excuse for hatred and prejudice. Fred Phelps & the WBC is an extreme example, though not an atypical one.
Perhaps, but the major problem was that Alexander never left an heir. (He didn’t swing that way, y’see…) 
One of Alexander’s wives was pregnant when he died. and she gave birth a few weeks later. The problem wasn’t that he didn’t leave an heir. The problem was that the heir was a newborn, and that doesn’t make a good succession. And, Alexander “swung” both ways. On the male side, he probably took his friend Hephaestion as his lover, and on the female side, he married Roxane for love, and also had a bunch of mistresses.
As Captain Amazing says, he did actually have a wife and did breed and heir (also as he says, he ‘swung both ways’, which was pretty common among the Greeks, especially the military and nobility)…the trouble was that he died before he could secure either the empire or the succession. Had he lived another 10 years or so I think (had he settled down to rule and run his empire instead of haring off to the next war) history would have been profoundly different.
-XT
Mary Jo Kopechne?
Why? Even if Felipe and Mary only had female children it would be a hard sell for Elizabeth to gain traction in a rebellion without a husband. Elizabeth would need to marry, because few people would follow her because she is female. Then the question becomes who she marries. Will Mary and Felipe let her marry a Protestant to run a rebellion – no way. They will only give her vouched Catholic prospects. I can easily see Mary convincing Elizabeth that since there is at least one and the possibility of more heirs that Elizabeth’s best chance of power is as an Abbess. They give her a wealthy and powerful Abby and she turns her formative administrative skills on a new community of female religious. She may even end up a Catholic saint, as foundress of a new order.
Or illegitimate. Alexander very likely left two sons, the posthuomous Alexander IV and an older bastard, Heracles, by his mistress Barsine. At least one of the Diadochi, Alexander’s boyhood friend and later admiral Nearchus, purportedly backed him as a candidate to succeed Alexander. But Nearchus was a Cretan Greek and thus like Eumenes never had sufficient pull with the xenophobic Macedonians to act as an independant power-broker. In the end Heracles was murdered just like Alexander IV, one more pawn lost to the Wars of the Diadochi.
ETA:
And it was possible two of Alexander’s wives were pregnant at his death. The Persian princess Stateira is in some accounts alleged to have been murdered by Roxane because she may have been carrying a rival heir.
The Spanish marriage was extremely unpopular. Wyatt’s Rebellion saw several thousand rebels take up Elizabeth’s cause and that was without her even openly supporting them (most historians believe she truly didn’t play an active role in the rebellion). If she could have escaped from Mary’s clutches and actually rallied troops- attractive, maritable age, non-Catholic (whether you’d call her Protestant or not depends on definition)- she probably could have made quite a show, plus Philip and his father had powerful enemies all over Europe.
Lincoln did not die young. (RFK did – 42 is young for a politician.)
He died before his time, and more importantly he died before he could implement his vision for reconciliation with the South. Assuming he would have done what he had planned, and actually been able to pull it off, I think things would have been a lot different than they played out historically, especially with how blacks were treated in both the North and South. We might have had a substantial Civil Rights movement at the turn of the century instead of in the 60’s. Blacks might have been service in numbers in the military before WWI (as combat troops instead of just as stewards and support troops).
Lincoln might have died within a few years anyway (he looked pretty old and used up in the last few pictures we have of him), but had he lived long enough to put in place his vision of the post war reconciliation it might have made a big difference. It certainly would have been different, as his successor did things differently than Lincoln planned to do them.
-XT
With all the posts about Henry VIII, I’m surprised nobody has mentioned Henry V.
After defeating Charles VI of France, Henry forced Charles to name him his heir in 1420, and Charles was kind enough to die just two years later, which would have united England and France under one ruler.
Unfortunately, Henry died a few months before Charles, at age 34, and left as his heir an infant who was also mentally unstable. France was able to break away as England’s nobles scrambled for control of the poor kid.
No he wouldnt. The problem with the conquest of France is that it wasnt something that could be solved with “just the Right Leader”. It was mainly a problem of too big a land to conquer for England.