-| History |-

As both a student of history and a person devoted to living in the present, I admit that I do not spend a lot of time imagining how things might otherwise have been. But I do like to think there is difference between being resigned to a situation and reconciled to it.

History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair. With the benefit of time, the historian looks back and points to a date in the manner of a gray-haired marshal pointing to a bend in a river on a map: There it was, he says, the turning point. The decisive factor. The fateful day that fundamentally altered all that was to follow.