What If? Alternate History and the Historical Imagination

Catalog description

What if the American Revolution had failed? What if the South had won the Civil War? What if Hitler had never been born? This seminar investigates why these and other counterfactual questions have increasingly been posed in works of Western popular culture in the last generation. In exploring the recent emergence of counterfactual history as a cultural phenomenon, we examine a wide range of speculative novels, films, television shows, comic books, plays, and historical essays in comparative analytical fashion. In the process, we attempt to arrive at general conclusions about how counterfactual narratives help us better understand the roles of causality and morality in history, as well as the broader workings of collective memory.