An Explanation

Whenever I first pitch the idea of the Casual History Project to people, the first thing they always ask is, "Why?"  I normally at a loss to answer.  I certainly have no standing in the academic history community, and there are probably tons of resources out there that can cover aeons of history more fully and with more authority than I can.  So what gives me the arrogance to think that I can outline and edit a complete history of the world? Well, to begin, I'm pretty arrogant, anyway.  But beyond that, there has always been something missing in the way history is reported.  For the last several hundred years, history has been written by authority, but history doesn't happen under authority.  Indeed, the most dynamic events occur because someone had the courage and the will to challenge authority.  History is the result of multiple compromises and interactions, but to read most authoritative histories, you would never truly realize that the Age of Discovery, the Italian Renaissance, the Tudor Period, the Little Ice Age, the Reformation, and the collapse of the Nordic Empires were all more or less concurrent periods and events. Each of those factors listed above and hundred of others all influenced each other in that period to create what we see as an inevitable (because that's the way it happened) history.  history happens everywhere there are humans, and because humans are garrulous and mobile, history rarely happens in a vacuum.  The West African slave trade didn't start when Portuguese sailors accepted captured blacks in exchange for trade goods any more than the  war between the Iroquois League and the Hurons started with the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Yet we are limited in our knowledge, and in the things we are willing to learn.  We look behind us and see one, maybe two or three, of the roads that led us here, but there were thousands. Because,as I said before, history doesn't happen in a vacuum.  Refugees from wars and natural disasters migrate to new places and share their histories with the new people they meet, conquerors overwhelm client states and overlay their own history (embellished to justify the conquest) over the subjugated, and, always, merchants and traders bring history and technology and philosophy from one place to another.  China didn't just appear on the map with Marco Polo's journals; Europeans had been trading with China and hearing tales of Chinese dynasties for thousands of years (albeit slightly buffered by the various Fertile Crescent empires that stood between).  The Polynesians reached Easter Island long before Columbus reached Cuba; given artistic similarities can anyone really say that the preColumbian cultures, especially those in the northern parts of South America and in Central America, were entirely based on independent development by the descendents of wandering Paleolithic tribesmen? And that is Why.  As I see it, the Casual History Project is less an authority, and more a doorway to discussion.  To move beyond linear retellings of inevitable events and discuss wildly divergent influences and outcomes.  Because history only fascinates me because it is made up of the intersecting and conflicting interests and views of People.  And the telling of it should be the same way.