> “The Civil War was inevitable, but it didn’t have to be that way.” ---quote from a student history paper. A month before the paper was written, the history professor ranted extensively to the rest of the faculty how annoying it was that he had to stop his lecture, and spend time defining the word ‘inevitable’ to his class.
This sounds like it could have been an interesting discussion about what historians mean when they call something inevitable. "Inevitable literally means unavoidable, and in practice historians use it to mean a situation where... Scholars often say the war became inevitable after..."
I still think it’s a bit harsh to judge it as contradictory without the rest of the paper. Another valid interpretation:
“The Civil War was inevitable [given the sequence of historical events], but it didn’t have to be that way [if we hypothetically could change a couple small pivotal scenarios].”
The rest of the paper would need to support that title of course, but a catchy title that causes someone to rage-read your paper is the literary equivalent of clickbait and a time honored tradition of aspiring writers.
This sounds like it could have been an interesting discussion about what historians mean when they call something inevitable. "Inevitable literally means unavoidable, and in practice historians use it to mean a situation where... Scholars often say the war became inevitable after..."