I was very privileged this afternoon to have been in attendance during a lecture given by Professor Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History and director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilization at Tulane University. He spoke about his direct involvement in the Katrina disaster and its recovery in New Orleans. He just published a new book Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The lecture was phenomenal but I asked a question during his Q&A session which probably made me look like a know-it-all asshole to the people I was with but also illuminated a valid point about the subject of history and why it is so important.

I asked him a What If question. I said, "What would the world look like today in terms of World War II, the Cold War and the War on Terror and the economics of New Orleans the city had Huey Long not been murdered and ran against and beat FDR in 1936?"

There were a lot of murmurs in the crowd after I asked my question and Professor Brinkley did his best to relate his answer to the discussion at hand and the interest level of the audience, making a very valid point about the nature of corruption in Louisiana politics, leaving the audience to deduce that this corruption would have made its way into national politics.

To me, the What Ifs are the best thing about history. You know, when Newt Gingrich writes a fictionalized account of what might have happened post-Battle of Gettysburg had Robert E. Lee not made a crucial error which he had never made in any of the previous campaigns prior to this one--what would the world look like? Would the North and South have continued as two separate nations existing side by side like in Europe? If so, what would the North American response to World War I look like? And how would that have affected World War II?

Fascinating stuff. This are the things that make history as a subject so pertinent in our daily lives.