Evitable History

Please read (and contribute to) the historical discussion in the combox for The Practice Of Deception. We realize that:

historical developments are neither inevitable nor predictable;

there is a lot of work for Poul Anderson's Time Patrol;

there is also endless scope for alternative histories fiction;

in the words of Shakespeare's Second Witch, every battle is "...lost and won..." (see here) but, from our point of view, it is lost or won with major consequences either way;

also relevant is Marx's and Engels' statement that the outcome of class struggles is never inevitable because every past fight has:

"...each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."
-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1985), 1, p. 79.