What if essays

This was my first book completely focused on counterfactuals and it left me feeling pretty underwhelmed. Each counterfactual was written by a different author, so the quality varies significantly between them. One problem for me was the lack of illustrations. The majority of the essays would have at most one illustration.

This seems like a major mistake to me because, if you are going to try and convince me that a general deciding to do one thing over another would have changed the entire trajec This was my first book completely focused on counterfactuals and it left me feeling pretty underwhelmed. This seems like a major mistake to me because, if you are going to try and convince me that a general deciding to do one thing over another would have changed the entire trajectory of history, it'd be helpful to see something like a layout of the battlefield or an illustration of detailed troop movements.

Most of the illustrations were pretty vague and illustrated things that I can easily picture, while events or occurrences that I struggled to imagine were just described. A few of the authors committed major sins in my opinion that I'm sure are prevalent in the counterfactual community. They extrapolated beyond where they should have stopped. They'll change one minor occurrence early in a war and then next thing you know, they've made wild assumptions and suddenly they are telling you their predictions of life a couple thousand years later.

One of the major themes of the book was how so many events in history could have been massively altered by minor decisions and minor differences like a slight change in the weather. It seemed ridiculous to me that some of the authors would change their one detail, and then act like they could predict everything else.

If anything, this book argues that it is complete folly to make predictions far beyond the immediate events because history has been shaped by razor thin margins repeatedly. So it seems dumb that some of the authors tell us how this one tiny little difference could change all of history, and let me tell you how that would have changed things for the next 3, years. I was pleasantly surprised that most of the authors were pretty level-headed with their bias and didn't analyze everything in a one sided manner.

A ton of my education growing up in high school and college would demonize the West and Christianity in particular, acting like Christianity was the source of all wrongdoing in the world while completely ignoring or praising Islam. A couple of the early essays did this a little bit and basically posited that life would've been so much better if Islam had conquered Europe and would still be far better today. Looking at the different trajectories Christian and Islamic nations have taken since the Middle Ages, I think most would objectively say that Christian nations have provided a better path towards freedom, liberty, and prosperity than Islamic nations that are still theocracies to this day.

Of course, most people who would object to this claim just blame Christian nations for all of the woes of Islamic nations, but now we're going down the rabbit's hole.

Later essays back off that train of thought, and I was happy to read pretty harsh rebukes of Communism in particular. Another annoyance from one of the first essays was how the author would continuously talk about what a "common sense" religion should be. Sorry to break it to this guy, but we've got quite a few religions in the world and people have vast disagreements over almost everything. There is nothing common sense about his arguments.

He wasn't arguing for consistency in religious texts or anything like that. It was more like, common sense says god should be like this or common sense says religious beliefs should be structured in this way. Pure nonsense. My favorite essay was what would have happened if D-Day had failed. I think the most heart breaking was the decision by Chang Kai-Shek to listen to Marshall and try for peace with the communists instead of finishing them off.

The likely events following an American defeat at Midway was pretty fascinating as well. I would've enjoyed seeing more what if scenarios that weren't directly related to battles. I just read a few of the other reviews and am disappointed but not surprised at all of the whining that this book is so focused on European and American events.

What a bunch of babies. Much as these cry-babies don't like it, Europe controlled or influenced much of the world for a significant amount of time. In more modern history, the USA has also held this role. That means counterfactuals are pretty interesting for these regions because they were so influential.

Do you think more people would be interested in how a battle like D-Day could have changed a world wide war that has major and somewhat clear implications on life today or would they prefer a counterfactual on something that happened in Kenya? None of the reviews I saw gave any examples of what would have been a better choice, they just whispered through their tears that this is racist.

The fact of the matter is, the further back in history you go, the less accurate detail you are likely to have. You'll have a hard time doing a counterfactual on some minute detail of a military campaign when we don't have those minute details because it happened 5, years ago. Much of history that we have detailed enough knowledge to do a good counterfactual are during time periods that Europe was the dominant global power.

But yeah, I guess it's all just racism. Dec 19, Derek Lee rated it it was ok Shelves: history , politics , society , technology. I read this book originally sometime in my senior year of high school, and I was enraptured by the concept of alternative history. Recognizing the fragility of our present and how it was shaped by an infinite number of discreet decisions made, actions taken, and random chances, was a mindblowing experience for me.

Rereading it today showed me how much I've grown, and unfortunately how outdated and biased many of the authors are in this set of collected essays. In particular, I remembered the essa I read this book originally sometime in my senior year of high school, and I was enraptured by the concept of alternative history.

In particular, I remembered the essays about how the culture of Rome might have been Persian, rather than Greek, if not for a close battle. That Rome, the Grecian weebs that they were, would not have been obsessed with the hallmarks of Classical Athens if Greek culture weren't dominant through the Mediterranean during Rome's rise.

I thought this was about the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis, but this was actually the take by the author of the essay, "Conquest Denied" by Josiah Ober about Alexander's Battle of Granicus River.

More on that mix-up later. The anthology is arranged chronologically, generally focuses on military decisions or close battles, and speculates on how different our society today would be. It is academic in nature other alternative histories might delve more into the narratives of inhabitants in these worlds, but not this one and is written by professors of history, but the tone and writing styles vary widely between the authors. Alternate history is, by nature, speculation, so the personal views of the authors ring clear in their essays.

Thermopylae is famous infamous if you were in middle school circa like me for the final stand of the Spartans, and Salamis for being the decisive Athenian naval victory that ended the invasion.

It opened the world to me that how we understand things are entirely constructed by our own perspectives, which are always influenced by our parents, our teachers, our media, and of course, how we view history.

Persia is widely misunderstood in the West. Persia was an advanced civilization with a rich history, religion, and social structure. Unfortunately, writing was not nearly as widespread as in Greece, and the materials used more susceptible to degradation. Practically all of what we understand about Persia including that name comes to us from the Greeks and other non-Persians. As you might imagine, the perception of Persia from the people who successfully fended off an invasion is not going to be exactly glowing.

The morals and ethics of Persians were not barbaric or insane - they literally came from a different place than Greek culture. The Persians had different worldviews and standards, owing to a different world. Greeks burned their dead and were horrified by Persians leaving the dead on bare hills for the vultures. But the Persians weren't disrespecting the deceased - they were honoring them in the way Zoroastrianism dictated.

On the other side of the coin the Greeks sullying pure fire with the stench of death was revolting to the Persians. None of this is barbarism, but humans fundamentally acting in the way their cultures dictated.

By the title alone, I could tell this was not the balanced and nuanced essay about the relative merits of Persian vs. Greek culture vis a vis the Romans. Indeed, "No Glory That Was Greece" is a fawning panegyric about how close "we" came to never having the "glory" of Athenian democracy, Greek art, and all the tangible and intangible legacies the West inherited. It's a polemic against the barbaric Persians, their autocracy and how they could have "extinguished" the budding light of Greece in its infancy.

To say I was disgusted rereading the unabashed Western imperialist dribble coming from the pen of Hanson whom I just looked up on Wikipedia and confirmed my suspicions about as a narrow-minded Classicist whose views should have died out decades ago is an understatement.

The essays that had once opened my eyes to the world were slapped back in my face as I could barely contain my anger reading the same adoration of Western culture that naive romanticists espoused that led the world to the path of the rise of nationalism, fascism, and the horrors of WWII, published in My utter disappointment with the essay on Salamis was somewhat redeemed by the essay I had conflated it with: "Conquest Denied" by Josiah Ober.

The context for the Battle of Granicus River was years after Salamis, Alexander fought and conquered the known world by the age of With his bloody wars came Hellenization, the distribution of Greek culture throughout the Mediterranean. The world the Romans came into knowing undoubtedly had Greek culture as dominant thanks to Alexander.

The various successor kingdoms carried Greek culture and blended it with the local cultures. When the shabby Rome, good at fighting, but little in the war of the arts, encountered the Mediterranean, they encountered a world where Athenian ideals were dominant, and the Romans gobbled it up and coopted it. Ober wrote the nuanced essay I remembered. Instead of falling into racist tropes about Persians, Ober describes how a Granicus where a headstrong and green Alexander winds up dead after taking his first steps into Asia Minor leads to a world where Persian culture is dominant.

Alexander had little impact on the military rise of Rome, so there's little reason to believe that Rome would be stopped from conquering its historical territories of Egypt, the Levant, and Asia Minor. Instead of a Hellenized world with the Library of "Alexandria" and the "platonic" ideal, Rome would have adopted the rich culture of the dominant Parthian Empire.

A world where Rome and Persia were culturally-aligned may have led to more integration between the worlds, and abrogated Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory.

Rereading What If? But What If? The total is somewhere between 4 and 5, but closer to 4 for me I am European because it is too American-centered: way too much about the Independence War and Civil War, which gets really boring.

Sep 13, Glen Robinson rated it liked it. It is filled with essays by leading military historians. Some of the topics include: what if Alexander the Great had died early, what if the Romans had won the battle against the Germans in the Teutoburg Forest, what if the Mongols had conquered Europe, what are the many ways the Americans could have lost the Revolutionary War, and what if World War I never happened.

Some of the writers are better than others—Steven Ambrose, James McPherson, and Caleb Carr immediately come to mind—while others struggle to eliminate smugness and academia from their writing. The writing is, in other words, inconsistent for a book that is intended for the general public, with some very excellent writers, and some mediocre at best ones.

Some of the writers get bogged down in the telling of events leading up to the turning point, while others talk exhaustively about the actual event in question.

Going on Amazon, I see that Cowley had at least one or two similar books in this series, so I presume he had a modicum of success with this project. Sep 23, liirogue rated it liked it. A compilation of essays that look at how things might have gone if battles had turned out differently.

I found some of the scenarios very interesting. Unfortunately, either my attention span or the quality of the book began to suffer as it continued. Since the later essays were close in time, they seemed to become rather repetitive. There were even occasions when the same battle was written about twice, which really began to push my boredom level.

Overall, an interesting book, but it definitely c A compilation of essays that look at how things might have gone if battles had turned out differently.

Overall, an interesting book, but it definitely could have used some diversification. It got to where I could predict some of the theories of where history may have gone if X had been changed - they needed to mix the formula up a bit. Nov 08, Sherwood Smith added it Shelves: alternate-universe , history.

When I saw the names James M. McPherson and John Keegan, I thought this would be fun, but as I trudged through it, enjoying speculative paragraphs here and there, just to be mired in tangents about tactical and cultural what-ifs, I realized that what these guys are doing is describing fiction without actually telling a story.

I guess this sort of thing is fun for a certain kind of mindset--the distant view of the chess board of history--but it became an exercise in frustration for me, who likes t When I saw the names James M.

I guess this sort of thing is fun for a certain kind of mindset--the distant view of the chess board of history--but it became an exercise in frustration for me, who likes to try to get inside the heads of the history makers as much as I can. Aug 21, Julie Jenkins rated it really liked it Shelves: queue. This was really, really interesting to read. I love alternative history novels, so why not a series of essays ranging from BC to the s?

It really fired up my imagination, which I love. The concept is five stars, but my personal interest level varied by each author's writing style and period of history.

Nov 05, Clay Davis rated it it was amazing. This book has some great history in it. The history experts come up with some very good explanations on the way events turned out the way they did and what could have happened. I picked this up because I enjoyed the scholarly counterfactual history speculations of Frank Ferdinand Lives!

The authors are largely drawn from the ranks of military historians and their main interest seems to be in talking about the operational mechanics by which various important wars could have come out differently. The essay on Napoleon, for example, speculates that he could have made more generous peace terms with Austria and Pr I picked this up because I enjoyed the scholarly counterfactual history speculations of Frank Ferdinand Lives!

The essay on Napoleon, for example, speculates that he could have made more generous peace terms with Austria and Prussia and not provoked Russia by creating the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and thus created a stable empire for himself in Western Europe. His essay is all about how had some particular lost order blunder not happened Lee could have successfully invaded the north and forced the Union to sue for peace. Fair enough. But the interesting question is — and then what? What happens to the world with an independent Confederacy?

Is that at all credible? Apr 05, Dr T rated it liked it. An interesting look at some of the mostly military turning points in history with speculation as to what might have been the outcome short- and long-term if things had gone the other way.

The book is a compilation of potential history essays by a large number of noted historians, mostly well-published professors, current or retired. As a result, most of the essays are crowded with obscure historic detail and highly academic discussions of potential courses of history.

I found the discussion An interesting look at some of the mostly military turning points in history with speculation as to what might have been the outcome short- and long-term if things had gone the other way. I found the discussion of the military and political settings and backgrounds for all of these turning points to be the most interesting parts of the book, because, although I consider myself reasonably well-read, the details of all these events were quite enlightening.

Many of the possible futures discussed seemed reasonable, as expected the discussions grew much more speculative the further in time the writers got from the actual events.

The discussions necessarily took on a very narrow view of potential futures, many well beyond reasonable extrapolations. So many potential circumstances in the projected futures are possible that the conclusions reached by the authors, while creative, seem very hard to accept. Jan 23, Alger Smythe-Hopkins rated it did not like it.

This should be a book that I would enjoy. I have degrees in history, I write history, I love speculative history I mean, I enjoyed The Guns of the South even though it was wholly insane. So a volume of best selling historians writing counter-factual fables collected from the pages of a well known popular history journal seemed promising as light entertainment at minimum and at best a chance to see major historical events from a new angle.

But rather than find this collection an easy read, tho This should be a book that I would enjoy. But rather than find this collection an easy read, thought-provoking, or even informative I find it aggressively tedious.

This is my second attempt at reading this book, my second bite at this apple, and let me assure you it is entirely made of worms. I simply cannot finish this mess without nausea. So what went wrong? The smallest problem is the dry style that prevails in these pages.

That is just backwards in a journal published for knowledgeable readers and prevents any speculation to the consequence of a battle beyond what is normal to the usual historical article. Equally irritating is that this template makes this a book of factual battle synopses rather than speculative history.

Far more serious than style is the limit of the events within the scope of the collection held to Europe and America. The resulting problem is that the history that these authors are used to writing is a tale of Euro-American hegemony and how it was won or maintained.

In the context of alternate history this means very little is different historically in India, or China, or South America as a result of any of these changed outcomes. This dead momentum is so extreme that one author speculates that the Caliphate would cross the Atlantic in and colonize just like the historical Spaniards. Just consider the implications of how that skews what you believe is possible. Another issue is a strong bias towards decisive tentpole victories. That is silly and promotes a view that western civilization is a almost entirely product of warcraft and weirdly fragile.

Certainly a change in the outcome of some major battle is an easier sell to the kind of armchair general that reads MHQ, but surely one in ten could see the cascading possibilities of an alternate history in some otherwise tiny skirmish going the other way. What if some consequential victory was reduced to a stalemate? How would that play out?

What if the victory were only moderate rather than decisive? Allied to this reliance upon tentpole victories is a serious lack of imagination as to what constitutes a key moment, even within this very restricted frame of reference to Euro-America. What if Henry had managed to slip away to Calais rather than being forced to make a stand at Agincourt? What if there never was a firing on Fort Sumter? The tentpole victory angle also strongly biases the collection towards Great Man history, since the casual understanding of battle is that it is won by leaders, not the armies that they lead.

Like the other objections related to this approach, the premise is that these leaders were somehow irreplaceable, and that their decisions helped create and sustain our modern world. As with the other objections this conception of history borders on teleology and is belied by how often the Great Men of our story arrive in their place of power by the removal of someone else who was equally qualified to be "irreplaceable".

There is almost no room in these stories for new talent or a momentum of events capable of carrying someone else with the tide to victory. There would have been no Napoleonic Age without Napoleon, but surely circumstances in begged for a military dictator of his type. In short, most of what I found objectionable about this collection was the extraordinary lack of imagination as to events and the outcomes resulting from a change.

Then there are overstated consequences to these bizarrely binary often Manichean outcomes. If Jerusalem fell to the Assyrians then imagine a world without Judaism. If Roman Legions had prevailed in the German forests, an undefeated and stable Empire lasting centuries beyond its expiration date.

Or how the United States might have fared under Japanese occupation? Or what the world would be like if nobody had invented the airplane? If you enjoy speculating about history in these counterfactual terms, there are many books and movies to satisfy you.

The counterfactual is a friend to science-fiction writers and chatting partygoers alike. But hold on a minute. These are big, important questions. O ne reason professional historians disdain counterfactuals is that they swing so free from the evidence. Did she try hard enough to find the kind of evidence that would answer her questions?

Does she extrapolate too much meaning from a scanty partial archive? Does she misunderstand the meaning of the evidence, in historical context? Or should she have taken another related group of sources into account? For the professional historian, these sources are not incidental to interpreting history; they are the lifeblood of doing so. In a counterfactual speculation, the usual standards for the use of evidence are upended, and the writer can find herself far afield from the record — a distance that leaves too much room for fancy and interpretation, making a supposedly historical argument sound more and more like fiction.

What is worse, counterfactual speculations spring naturally from deeply conservative assumptions about what makes history tick. Like bestselling popular histories, counterfactuals usually take as their subjects war, biography or an old-school history of technology that emphasises the importance of the inventor.

Women — as individuals, or as a group — almost never appear, and social, cultural, and environmental history are likewise absent.

Despite all these criticisms, a few historians have recently been making persuasive arguments that counterfactualism can be good — for readers, for students, and for writers. Historical speculation, they say, can be a healthy exercise for historians looking to think hard about their own motives and methods. Counterfactuals, if done well, can force a super-meticulous look at the way historians use evidence. And counterfactuals can encourage readers to think about the contingent nature of history — an exercise that can help build empathy and diminish feelings of national, cultural, and racial exceptionalism.

Was the US always destined as its 19th-century ideologues believed to occupy the middle swath of the North American continent, from sea to shining sea? Or is its national geography the result of a series of decisions and compromises — some of which, if reversed, could have led to a different outcome?

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