Alternative history

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the speculative fiction subgenre, see alternate history (fiction)

Alternative history or alternate history develops out of historiography to identify historical points of view that have been ignored, overlooked, or unseeable. It usually denotes a history told from an alternative viewpoint, rather than from the view (actual or ascribed, obvious or inferred) of imperialists, conquerors or explorers. For example A People's History of the United States offers a view sympathetic to people indigenous to the Americas, while the term Herstory was coined to denote history presented from a feminist perspective.

This falls into two major categories:

• Historical revisionism is the reexamination of the accepted facts and interpretations of history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more accurate, less biased or differently biased information.
• When revisionism takes on a partisan tone, it is usually called political historical revisionism i.e. a construction of past events which is refuted by well documented, verifiable, and very broadly accepted sources. Such histories may tend to blame their lack of scholarship or documentation on a conspiracy to erase such evidence.

Other alternative histories include:

• The genre of speculative fiction includes the subgenre of fictitious alternative history, set in worlds in which history has diverged from history as it actually happened. The term uchronia refers to a hypothetical time period in such a divergent world.
• Counterfactual history is a form of history which attempts to answer "what if" questions. It is an academic extrapolation of alternate outcomes of historical events. It is similar to the first category, but carried out with academic intent rather than to entertain. These two categories may blur into each other.
• Failed history covers events that have been predicted and had items created in the expectation that they would occur, but then in fact did not occur.
• Today in Alternate History, a daily-updated blog, featuring "Important Events In History That Never Occurred Today" in several recurring timelines.