Why am I passionate about this?
I’m probably too dishonest to write a real non-fiction book, but the sort of non-fiction book that has some wiggle room for me to “improve” on reality when I think it needs tightening up, or a little more schmaltz—that’s the strange twilight area the books I write live in, and all irresponsible history books dwell in this neighborhood. Remember, kids, as long as you make it clear when you’re lying, it still counts as non-fiction!
Hal's book list on irresponsible history
Why did Hal love this book?
Back in the 18teens, the president of Yale somehow had enough free time to lead the senior class in debates of various “questions” followed by an extemporaneous “decision” on who was right.
Yale’s President Dwight certainly had plenty of amusing ideas (that California was frequently visited by mariners from “Hindostan”; that Africans who “never expose their faces to the sun are white”), but what makes his “decisions” so interesting is that many of the questions force him to examine counterfactual histories.
And so he describes what the world would have been like if the Crusades had not happened (Europe bound in a perpetual feudal system!) or if the South were to secede (and this is in 1813, remember!—anyway, it wouldn’t turn out well, Dwight says).
(I found an 1833 copy of this book jammed behind a shelf and torn to pieces back when I was working in a used book…
1 author picked President Dwight's Decisions Of Questions Discussed By The Senior Class In Yale College, In 1813 And 1814 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
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