What if Napoleon Hadn’t Lost Europe and Other Questions of Alternate History
How the 200-year-old literary genre reflects changing notions of history and society
By Lorraine Boissoneault
smithsonian.com
June 13, 2018 9:31AM
Across pop culture, history is being unraveled and remade. There’s the post-World-War-II dystopia that emerges from a triumphant Nazi Germany in the TV show “The Man in the High Castle†(based on a Philip K. Dick book of the same name). There’s the furor that erupted in 2017 over a proposed HBO series called “Confederate,â€currently in limbo, which imagined an America in which the Confederacy successfully seceded from the Union, and the NBC show “Timeless†spends most episodes exploring “what if†scenarios in American history like “What if women never achieved the right to vote?â€.
Meanwhile, fiction writers have penned novels on variations of history stretching from a world in which the black plague killed 99 percent of Europe’s population, making way for a Muslim empire (The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson) to what would’ve happened if Franklin Delano Roosevelt hadn’t been elected to a third term at the dawn of World War II (Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America).
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-if-napoleon-lost-europe-and-other-questions-alternate-history-180969326/
