Maggie's What If Benchmark

What if Abraham Lincoln did not issue the Emancipation Proclamation? 

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LON1920
LON1920
                                                    Reflection

The point of divergence that I choose was to make the Union loose the Battle of Antietam. This caused Lincoln to not have enough power to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Changing this point in history only held things up rather than changed them. The League of Nations came in and enforced equality in 1920 as a result of the Union loosing the Battle of Antietam. 
The future I envisioned resulting from the POD was a whole different thing than I got. I expected that the world would still have slaves and that we wouldn't have Obama in presidency and it was a whole lot more dramatic then what it actually came out to be. I figured that if I got rid of the Emancipation Proclamation, that the world would be how it looked in the 1870's. It turns out that even without Abe Lincoln issuing the Proclamation, the League of Nations would have jumped in and declared freedom for the slaves. 
I had the most fun putting all of my sources together. When I wrote it all out, it finally made sense and was in some kind of order. My favorite part was closing up my wikispaces page and getting this done. The hardest part might have been making the fake primary sources because I didn't know how to actually make a source. Creating your own newspaper clipping is harder than I thought it would be! The most interesting fact had to have been that Abe Lincoln had to wait for a Union win to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. I would have thought that since he was president that he would be able to do whatever and be able to keep that power. 
The actions of each individual effects the history because if you change one point, it dominoes and changes multiple other events in history also. You cannot just erase or swap history and expect nothing to change. Even with an end result that is similar to how life is now, the history behind it has been changed. One decision can be majorly influential to the historical landscape. For example, the decision to make the Union win the Battle of Antietam changed the outcome of major historical events. 
I could improve this project by making the website more colorful and eye catching. If I had to do this project over, I would change the way I made the wikispace. I would add more links and make it more wikipedia like. 

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