Other Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures [Paperback]

What if there had been no World War I or no Russian Revolution? What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo in 1815, or if Martin Luther had not nailed his complaints to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517, or if the South had won the American Civil War? The questioning of apparent certainties or known knowns can be fascinating and, indeed, What if? books are very popular. However, this speculative approach, known as counterfactualism, has had limited impact in academic histories, historiography, and the teaching of historical methods. In this book, Jeremy Black offers a short guide to the subject, one that is designed to argue its value as a tool for public and academe alike. Black focuses on the role of counterfactualism in demonstrating the part of contingency, and thus human agency, in history, and the salutary critique the approach offers to determinist accounts of past, present, and future.

Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is author of many books including War and Technology (IUP, 2013), Fighting for America: The Struggle for Mastery in North America, 15191871 (IUP, 2011), and War and the Cultural Turn. Black is a recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize of the Society for Military History.

With a unique methodology, Black performs a what-if analysis of history to show howlittle it takes to change the worlds fate. . .This book provokes thought and speculation while also entertaining.This is the most robust defense of historical counterfactuals to date . . . For those interested in this fascinating subject, Blacks book is indispensable.[Black's] illustrative examples of 'what if,' 'how,' and 'why' will make readers sit back and wonder.A concise, comprehensive analysis of an approach to history that is far more complex than either its supporters or its critics understand. Black succeeds above all in establishing counterfactualism's importance in extending the grounded imagination. And that is increasingly impols0