Reddit reviews The Collected What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been

But the combination of the Japanese and Germans could over time.


If Hitler had made the decision not invade the USSR, the Luftwaffe had actually built heavy bombers(instead of medium/light bombers) and not attacked population centers, and the German navy had invested even more into submarines, I very much think the war could have gone differently for England.


Edit: If you love answers/questions like these, you'll love this book. I read it as a child and it is what made me a history teacher.

Counterfactual questions can be useful, but I've generally had an ambivalence toward them for several reasons. There's one reason, in particular, though, that I'd like to use to open up further questions and comments.

Most who frequent this subreddit might be familiar with this book. It's a fun read, but a quick look at the table of contents reveals that the essays are overwhelmingly addressing questions about military. Now, this isn't surprising, given that the book's concept is an expansion of an earlier one focused solely on military history. Thirty-three of the forty-five essays in the book revolve around "what-if-this-person-lost-this-battle" or "what-if-a-certain-war-had-been-won-by-the-other-side."

I figured that a lot of those essays were written with a different audience in mind, and since it wasn't my cup of tea, I didn't give it much further thought. But after reading this question and looking back through the book, I think that table of contents might explain my uneasiness with counterfactual historical questions.

It wasn't the fact that those questions were overwhelmingly on a subject for which I had only a tangential interest that bothered me, but that all of them, save for a handful, were placing the power to significantly alter history into the hands of a few great men. Napoleon Bonaparte, Otto von Bismarck, Robert E. Lee, Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, V. I. Lenin, and George Washington all figure prominently in these essays; there is little about everyday people, scant minority voices, and nothing about women.

However, I wonder if this isn't just a casualty of the way these questions are posed; even the most intriguing essays that attempt to incorporate multiple voices - the one at the end asking what would happen if potatoes were never transplanted to Europe from Peru is a good example - end up ultimately placing the power of changing history into the hands of a single man. In this case, it's completely on Pizarro bringing back the potato; there's no chance that peasants in Europe would have chosen not to cultivate it, there's no room to speculate if it might have gotten there by some other means.

This raises several questions, then (and this is the TL;DR version): Are counterfactual questions only useful or interesting when they're posed about the "big players" in history? Is it possible to ask such questions about "lesser" figures? And does focusing on the counterfactual marginalize the power/agency that everyday people had to alter the course of history?

I highly recommend you read them at some point - alternate histories have a lot of stigma surrounding them in the field of history. But this is a rare instance where famous academic historians at the top institutions just fucking went for it - they ignored that stigma and wrote essays that are paired with little introductory fiction stories that occur in these universes. You'll love it.


https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Eminent-Historians-Imagine-Might/dp/0399152385

Just recently bought three alternate history books that have some what if's


Election of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, how Germany might have won the war in 1915, etc.


Some of the stories do overlap if you take a look at the books but I will come back with my impressions of the WW1 chapters (Would take a very long time for me to read all three books)


The books are


http://www.amazon.com/What-If-Foremost-Military-Historians/dp/0425176428

http://www.amazon.com/What-If-II-Robert-Cowley/dp/042518613X

http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Eminent-Historians-Imagine-Might/dp/0399152385

a few people requested so here is the amazon link, i saw it in a Barnes and Nobles one day and bought it on impulse it features what if questions all across history from D-day, civil war, Cold war, Conquest of Alexander and several more it's a really good read, i'm a civil war dork so that section was really interesting to me but i've yet to finish it but it's really good
Edit: i forgot to put the link in http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Eminent-Historians-Imagine-Might/dp/0399152385/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1371068935&sr=8-4&keywords=What+if%3F+Robert+Cowley

What do you think about the Collected What If? It's presented as a collection of essays, rather than a novel.

Good point.

The Collected What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been https://www.amazon.com/dp/0399152385/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_a0c5BbQAK65MJ

Aw. I have a book of this kind of thing that's super interesting. There's a good deal of WW2 era stuff in there, but most of it is about the events of the war going differently (what if Normandy failed? what if they never cracked the Enigma machine?) Or looking at the 1930s if WW1 had ended differently.