Untitled. 15th President, 1857-61 Millard Fillmore merely stalled the Civil War — James Buchanan made it a near certainty.
Claiming that his hands were bound by the Constitution, Buchanan believed the best action to quell the threat of secession was no action at all. Sympathetic to the South, Buchanan supported the Dred Scott decision, and when Southern states stated their intention to withdraw from the Union, he called their actions illegal but said he had no authority to stop them. He hoped to negotiate a compromise but didn't bother seeking re-election, leaving behind little record of accomplishment and the Civil War looming starkly on the horizon. U.S. History. JFK's Funeral: Rare and Unpublished LIFE Magazine Photos From Arlington Cemetery, November 1963.
Five decades later, the assassination of John F.
Kennedy remains one of the few utterly signal events from the second half of the 20th century. Other moments — some thrilling (the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall), others horrifying (the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Challenger explosion) — have secured their places in the history books and, even more indelibly, in the memories of those who witnessed them. But nothing in the latter part of “the American century” defined an era as profoundly as the rifle shots that split the warm Dallas air on November 22, 1963, and the sudden death of the 46-year-old president. There was Camelot — a media construct, of course, but a rarity in that it actually resonated with so many people, everywhere — and then there was the somber, profoundly uncertain period after Camelot.
America as it could have been: 8 North American nations that didn’t make it to the 21st Century. North America.
We all recognise it on a map: it’s the continent above South America. Most of us can even name the countries, Canada, the United States, Mexico... other Spanish speaking ones... But, the point is, it might not have turned out that way. North America could have been as difficult a continent to learn as Europe if history had been different. Here are eight nations that all existed in North America mat one point in time, but didn't last to the twenty-first century.