What percentage of American citizens today are even descended from families who resided here pre-Civil War? I wouldn't be surprised if it's less than 15%.

If you think the World's Fairs are f&%ky, "alternative history" gets WAY weirder theories. A couple years ago, when I was supposed to be studying for the bar, I went down this rabbit hole for fun. I love history and architecture and thought it would be interesting to hear what these outsiders had to say. While a lot of them were Russians who were simply ignorant about the history west of the Volga and had good reason to distrust any history taught by a central authority (you know, because of Soviet Communism which lied about everything for nearly a century), there was a lot of thought-provoking stuff.

One of the most interesting ideas was a series of theories regarding manufactured history adding centuries worth of events that never happened simply by copy/paste-ing the same events over and over again and just changing the names a little bit. The idea was that the reason for the lack of archaeological and written evidence for the Medieval Dark ages is simple: they didn't happen. The distance of time between the Renaissance and the Christianization of Rome was much much much shorter than 1000 years.

The reason why stories like the Danelaw and the conquest of England by the Saxons nearly mirror each other is because they were literally the same event. It happened...once, just not twice. One of the events was an insertion.

See, there are really zero existing European written manuscripts dating from prior to the Crusades. During the 13th through 15th centuries, Europe began founding Universities where classic literary works pilfered from Constantinople and the Holy Land were copied, translated, and studied. All history of Europe from prior to about 1300 was compiled and recorded by enough people to fit in one medium sized church, and they were nearly all Catholic monks. There was an opportunity there to create primary source documents to say whatever they wanted.

All copies that were older than 1300 AD were eventually lost or destroyed, so while we believe that our versions of Josephus or Plato are accurate, we kinda just have to take those monks' word on that.

Once you go farther back than 1300 in Europe, the amount of information that you have in order to properly date sites and support the narrative of history gets extremely thin. In addition, there's the issues created by the multiple calendar switches which occurred in the Western World between the Julian and the Gregorian calendar system.

Heck, there's a nearly 300 year long gap in the history of buildings constructed in and around modern day Istanbul (then Constantinople). If the current narrative is to be believed, not a single building or large scale infrastructure project was erected during a nearly 300 year period near the height of the Byzantine Empire.

While I am still not convinced of the Mud Flood, I can at least recognize the plausibility of lost history as well as the opportunities that were present to completely re-write everything prior at multiple junctions between 1300 and 1913.

This post was edited on 11/17/21 at 4:17 pm