Recently there have been a host of books on the subject of an “alternate” universe. “Pick a year—any year—and you’ll find at least three moments where, had someone sneezed differently, we’d be living in another world. The problem is… most of those worlds still end up looking suspiciously like our own, just with different villains and better hats.”
We are trained to think that –
- War = important
- Elections = important
- Books and visits = charming but secondary
But history doesn’t behave that way.
- A story changes how people think
- A visit changes how leaders see power
- A conversation changes a decision no one records
“History books like to bold the wars and elections.
But just off the page, a mathematician is inventing nonsense that will reshape logic, a queen is quietly taking notes on the world that will one day take her throne, and an almost unknown politician makes a speech.
You don’t actually know which moments matter most while you’re living them.
And that’s the unsettling truth that makes alternate history feel plausible.
Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson)
In 1860, he’s not yet the Lewis Carroll. He’s a mathematician, a shy don at Oxford, taking photographs and telling stories to children.
But give it a few years and:
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland bends narrative logic
- Language becomes elastic
- Absurdity becomes a respectable literary tool
👉 Quiet ripple: the modern imagination shifts
Without him? You don’t quite get the same path to surrealism, satire, even the tone that later feeds into everything from children’s literature to political absurdity.
A world without Carroll is… less playful, and possibly less subversive.
👑
Liliʻuokalani — a Queen in Waiting
Her visit to New York in 1860 looks like a cultural footnote.
It isn’t.
She is:
- Observing Western power firsthand
- Absorbing political structures that will later collide with her own monarchy
- Standing, unknowingly, at the edge of a future that includes the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom
👉 Quiet ripple: the meeting of worlds
Moments like this are early contact points—where future conflicts are seeded long before anyone calls them that.
Toward the end of 1859, in New York D. W. Bartlett published Twenty-one Prominent Candidates for the Presidency in 1860, and in early 1860 a Philadelphia publishing house printed John Savage’s Our Living Representative Men, Prepared for Presidential Purposes. Abraham Lincoln was not listed among the “prominent candidates” in the former, nor was he considered “prepared for Presidential purposes” in the latter, but the Cooper Union Address, delivered in New York City on February 27, 1860 helped to propel Abraham Lincoln to the 1860 Republican Nomination.
On May 18, 1860, he was chosen as the Republican Party’s candidate for the Presidency. In a few short months he had risen from a relative unknown to winning the Republican Nomination.
More than 150 years later, Alice in Wonderland is a classic in literature though the motives of its author remain questionable. Hawaii was overthrown by a combination of missionaries and powerful white agricultural greed, but is now the 50th state and crossroads to the nations of the Pacific. The Civil war repercussions of freedom and racism still echo throughout our society despite the many achievements of descendants of former slaves.
1860 was a pivotal year in many more respects as is every year. Pick a noteworthy person or place and for many of them, little noted events at the time changed everything:
In 1860, Great Britain was at the height of its Victorian power, acting as the industrial and financial center of the world under the reign of Queen Victoria.
The Pony Express was a fast mail delivery service that began operations on April 3, 1860, cutting cross-country communication time between Missouri and California to about 10 days. It ended a little over a year later as did what we now consider “the wild west”.
Spanish control of “Alta California” had ended, the Gold Rush was basically over with statehood in 1850, but In 1860, California was a rapidly growing frontier state with a population of nearly 380,000 residents, deeply divided by the political tensions leading up to the American Civil War.
Pick a year any year and the currents are stirring and the possible futures are endless.
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