Weekend Assignment #168: Historical Excisions

So, feel up for a challenging, meaty Weekend Assignment? Because I have a topic this week that will require quite a bit of pondering. Ready? Here it is:

Weekend Assignment #168: For reasons best left unexplained, you have been allowed to excise one and only one person from the course of history. Which person would you choose to remove from history and why? That's right: Any one person you think history would be better without, you can now expunge. So who would it be -- and how do you think history would be changed with their absence? See. Told you it was one that would make you think.

This assignment comes with two rules. First, the person expunged has to be a human being; deities (and human iterations thereof) should be left out of this particular exercise, mostly because I'd like to avoid all the ranting such an excision would add. Second, try not to choose Adolf Hitler (because he's too easy) or either the current president or his predecessor (to avoid ranty political rantiness). Incidentally, picking either parent of any of these three folks just to get around this admonition is dirty pool. Other than that, pick whom you would like. This still leaves lots of potentially expungible historical figures.

Extra Credit: Favorite historical-themed movie. Because why not?

This one's a no brainer for me: The guy I'd excise from history is John Wilkes Booth, who -- aside from being a distant relative of mine -- is the fellow who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Which, you know, was bad, and not only for Mr. Lincoln.

Had Booth been excised from history, and Lincoln commensurately not assassinated, we would have been likely spared the Andrew Johnson presidency, which was, shall we say, not a highlight among presidential administrations (Johnson was the first president to be impeached, although to be fair to him, that had more to do with a power struggle with Congress than anything else), and possibly the botch that was the Reconstruction -- or at least the botch of it we're historically aware of.

Also, of course, it would have been interesting to see what a full second Lincoln term would be like -- whether Lincoln would continue to be held in such high regard if in fact he had had to administer the peace following the US Civil War, or if some of the same issues and pressures that had dragged down Johnson would have dragged him down too.

Also: if Lincoln had still been President in 1867, would he have gone with Secretary of State William H. Seward's idea to buy Alaska from Russia, as Johnson did? We might only have 49 states if so -- not to mention Russian territory on North American soil, which would have made things very interesting after WWII; the "Cold War" might not have been all that cold, is what I'm saying.

As for Booth, he was a fine actor, from a family of fine actors, but there were lots of fine actors. He would not have been missed too terribly (certainly not by me -- I'm not a direct-line descendant). So, yes. Out he goes, Lincoln stays. I don't know if that particular timeline would be better than the timeline in which we currently live, but I think it's a timeline I would be interested in seeing.

Favorite historical movie? Patton. It just works for me. And I think George C. Scott's performance is pretty awesome.

Your turn: Who would you take out of history and why? And what do you think might happen then? Think about it, write it up in your blog or journal. And then come back here to leave a link. I can't wait to see how history gets changed.