So what would Northwest Indiana be like if the Declaration of Independence had never been signed?
Porter County Historian Selena Ard said when she was in graduate school, she had to investigate counterfactual histories, so she liked this challenge.
“It’s a really fascinating way of looking at what has happened in history and how every event in history is connected to so many things that have happened,” she said.
“If the American Revolution hadn’t happened, then neither would have the French Revolution,” Ard said. The Americans’ battle for independence set the template for revolutions elsewhere.
“It was destined to happen in North America because of the concentration of people in such a small area and the philosophical world that existed at the time really lends itself to a revolution,” Ard said.
“You had all these great thinkers who were publishing great things. This is what it means to be human. This is what it means to be free.”
James D. Lane, emeritus history professor at Indiana University Northwest, sees it as inevitable, too.
The end of the French and Indian War led directly to tensions between the Americans and the British, he said.
“The hunger for land, what was called the Old West east of the Mississippi,” had to be sated this way, Lane said.
“History is a process. It’s easy to look backwards and in hindsight,” Ard said.
She’s not excusing the mistakes of the Founding Fathers and early Americans, but just as individuals grow when we get older, “so does a nation, and so does a constitution. They didn’t have cellphones. They didn’t have the internet. They didn’t even have radios.”
“There has to be some shifting in the nation as they grow older and grow and mature,” Ard said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
