On a winter night in 1931, 57-year-old Winston Churchill stepped off the curb of 5th Avenue & 76th St. in New York City and was hit by a car.
SPOILER: He survived. But I think 1000 writers could probably do a lot with what could have happened if he hadn't. Now, the job of speculative fiction authors everywhere has become somewhat easier, thanks to Here Is Where, a project to locate and map the sites of little-known, relatively unimportant historical events in the United States.
Technically, the possibilities for alternate history are just a happy side-effect of Here Is Where, which is really about preserving tiny details of history for people who want to geek out over the parking garage where Bob Woodward met Deep Throat, or the baseball diamond where U2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers died in a helicopter crash. According to the New York Times, it was inspired by...
a story founder Andrew Carroll read 15 years ago about a dramatic rescue that occurred during Abraham Lincoln's first term as president. The president's son Robert Todd Lincoln was about to board a sleeping car at Exchange Place in Jersey City one night when he fell between the platform and the train as it started to pull out of the station.
"My coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform," Lincoln recalled years later. "Upon turning to thank my rescuer I saw it was Edwin Booth, whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by name."
Mr. Carroll hopes to install a marker at the site, now a PATH station.
That would be Edwin Booth, older brother of John Wilkes, btw. Right now, Andrew Carroll is traveling cross-country, collecting stories for the project. You can read about what he's found on his blog. Whether you turn what you read there into a best-selling novel is up to you.
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This is what augmented reality technology is designed for. I would love to have a device that told me this sort of thing, and just wander around the city with it.
The "What if Churchill got hit by the taxi" one has been done a ton, including ,a href="http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/xbox360/turningpointfallofliberty?q=turning%20point">a terrible videogame.
If you find the Robert Todd Lincoln-Edwin Booth thing interesting, you should read Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowel. It has a chapter on each of them, both very interesting.
I was just reading about alternate-history Star Wars comics on Wookieepedia. Apparently if C-3PO had had a loose screw in his neck, Darth Vader would have reformed and dressed in all-white armor. Seriously, not making this up.
Logging in to BoingBoing is broken:
Anyways, the video host used in those articles sucks hardcore. I load the page, and the video refuses to play. I reload the page, and it plays the wrong video, somehow...
Hey Maggie, Thanks for featuring Andy - you can find the archive of all of his blog posts for National Geographic Traveler here: http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/intelligenttravel/here-is-where/
@ Anonymous @ 3:39
And now I'm obsessed with how the future world will be different because Anonymous was unable to view the correct videos.