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Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History. By Richard J. Evans. Waltham, Mass.: Brandéis University Press, 2013. Pp. xvii + 150. $29.95 paperback.
Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History is a collection of essays by Richard J. Evans, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge and president of Wolfson College, Cambridge. They are a product of his 2013 Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures for the Historical Society of Israel. Evans's specialty is modern Germany; his three volumes on the Third Reich comprise the standard history. Many of us will remember In Defense of History ( 1997) in which he systematically dismantled the postmodernist critique of historical truth and scholarship. In this slim volume, he continues the fight for real history, taking aim at counterfactual or "what if" history and its practitioners.
The premise of counterfactual history is that a single change in the course of events can set history on a new imagined trajectory that provides a deeper...