Alternate history

Alternate history is fiction that imagines historical events unfolding differently from recorded history. It explores how changes to the past might reshape societies, people, and later events.

Counterfactual history: The study of how history might have unfolded differently if past events or conditions had changed. Alternate history turns counterfactual questions into imagined narratives.
The Man in the High Castle: Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel imagines a world in which the Axis powers won World War II. Its divided postwar America is one of the genre’s most influential imagined outcomes.
Time travel: Movement between different points in time, commonly used as a speculative-fiction device. Some stories make a changed timeline possible through characters traveling into the past.
Historical memory: The ways groups remember, interpret, and transmit accounts of the past. Imagined outcomes expose how collective memory depends on which events occurred.
Point of divergence: The moment or change that sends an alternate timeline away from recorded history. It establishes the premise from which an alternate history develops.
The Plot Against America: Philip Roth’s 2004 novel imagines Charles Lindbergh defeating Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 U.S. presidential election. It shows alternate history reshaping familiar domestic life through a changed election.
Parallel universe: A hypothetical or fictional world that exists alongside another, often with different events or histories. Some alternate histories frame divergence as entry into a separate timeline.
National identity: A shared sense of belonging shaped by a nation’s history, culture, institutions, and symbols. Changing foundational events reveals how contingent national identity can be.
Historical fiction: Fiction set in a past period, often combining invented characters with historical settings and events. Both forms use the past as narrative material, but only alternate history changes its events.
Bring the Jubilee: Ward Moore’s 1953 novel depicts a future shaped by a Confederate victory in the American Civil War. Its defeated Union offers a classic example of a single military reversal remaking society.

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