Jim, I've got a copy of Kantor's book. It's a fascinating treatise, and I was intrigued by the possibilities he raised. The problem with speculative "future history" is that historical events do not happen in a vacuum. If you change an historical event, that new event's impact on contemporaneous historical events could result in other new events, which would affect other events. Those new events would alter all other known events exponentially, and the result could be an entirely different world. The only disappointment I have in Kantor's book is that he didn't, in my opinion, take all this far enough into account.

I love to read "what-if's", though. One "what-if" that is intriguing is that if the South had won the Civil War, the westward expansion of the United States would have been significantly interrupted, and the Mexicans would have reoccupied the area from Arizona to Colorado. Another "what-if" I read was that with the United States divided into two smaller, and individually weaker countries, Canada would be the dominate power on the continent. Fascinating stuff.

We'll never know, of course, what that alternate universe would really look like. But we do know what the path of our nation has been in the real world.

Great idea for an interesting thread, Jim. I look forward to reading what others have to say on the subject.