These are annotations for the sixteenth chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer? I should probably mention that you can buy the book just about anywhere, including here, or you can nag your local library about acquiring a copy.
p. 306
•epigraph: The epigraph for this chapter would have been:
…through Behring Straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world.
§Melville, Moby Dick (1851).
•No one knows that Arkansas is “The Natural State”: I’d originally joked that Arkansas is the natural state because it is poor, nasty, and brutish, which, ha ha!, is a solid jape. But someone pointed out that such a jape could reasonably be construed as an insane prejudice against Arkansas, which is not one of my insane prejudices. Not wanting to alienate my readership, I cut it. (The hack on New Jersey is milder, and I can get away with it because I lived there for a decade.)
p. 307
•died (as was the custom) of scurvy: I’ve mentioned before how I initially wanted this book to be more “intratextual,” and you can see how I might include a reference here to all that scurvy talk on p. 281.
p. 310
•the reason the Republic of Ireland claims Ulster or Argentina claims the Falkland Islands: Talk about alienating my readership! Hey, for that matter, why does Spain claim Gibraltar?
•Lincoln was shot by the handsomest man in America: And here’s where I’d put a “hyperlink” to p. 108. And a couple of pages after this, when Karl Marx, appears, I could have “linked” to p. 94, on which Marx’s nascent Lutheranism gets discussed. It would have been off-topic, but still boss! Maybe I should have talked them into setting the ebook version this way…
p. 311
•epigraph: The epigraph here was to be
Let’s kiss.
§Nikita Krushchev to Richard Nixon, 1959.
(Context/my source (beware! pdf!).)
Just because things remind me of things, let me quote adventurer/diplomat Francis Younghusband, from a 1891 letter to his wife:
I was utterly flabbergasted at seeing the [Russian] Secretary go up and kiss the Consul three times on both cheeks and then see the Consul go up to Macartney and kiss him likewise! He then advanced on me but as much as I like him I draw the line at kissing him, so I extended my hand well in front of me to keep him at a respectable distance while I wished him Happy Easter.
[Patrick French, op. cit., p. 89.]
p. 313
•An international incident ensued: Kyle Ward’s History in the Making points out how the Carolina incident was once a major talking point in US history textbooks and is now all but forgotten. [Ward, History in the Making: An Absorbing Look at How American History Has Changed in the Telling over the Last 200 Years (The New Press, 2007) pp. 132ff.]
p. 317
•When Richard Nixon took Nikita Khrushchev: Khrushchev tends to come across as a toddler in these so-called “kitchen debates,” which is weird, because he’s talking with the often-petulant Nixon.
Nixon: Neither one [viz. US or USSR] should put the other in a position where he in effect faces an ultimatum.
Khrushchev: Who is giving an ultimatum?
Nixon: We will discuss that at another time.
Khrushchev: Since you raised the question, why not now when people are listening. We know something about politics too. Let your correspondents compare watches and see who is filibustering. What do you mean?
Nixon: I’ll be very direct. I’m talking about it on the international scene—
Khrushchev (breaking in): That sounds like a threat to us. We too are giant. You want to threaten us. We will answer threat with threat.
[Quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon vol. 1: The Education of a Politician 1913–1962 (Simon & Schuster, 1987) pp. 524–25.]
•Cuba, some one hundred miles from US territory: The buoy at Key West reads “ninety miles to Cuba” but is actually located 110 miles away. The closest distance between Cuba and Florida, according to wikipedia, is 94 miles. JFK, when complaining and campaigning against Eisenhower’s failure to reconquer Cuba, used the Key West 90-mile estimate. [Ambrose, op. cit. p. 590.]
p. 318:
•no rallying point for the loyalists: Except, of course, for this plucky kid!
