If It Had Happened Otherwise

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If It Had Happened Otherwise is a 1931 collection of essays edited by J. C. Squire and published by Longmans, Green. Each essay in the collection could be considered an alternate history or counterfactual history, a few written by leading historians of the period like Winston Churchill. The original edition included the following essays:[1]

• If Drouet's Cart had Stuck by Hilaire Belloc
• If Don John of Austria had Married Mary Queen of Scots by G. K. Chesterton
• If Lee had not Won the Battle of Gettysburg by Winston Churchill
• If Napoleon had Escaped to America by H. A. L. Fisher
• If the Moors in Spain had Won by Philip Guedalla
• If the General Strike had Succeeded by Ronald Knox
• If the Emperor Frederick had not had Cancer by Emil Ludwig
• If Louis XVI had an Atom of Firmness by André Maurois
• If Byron had Become King of Greece by Harold Nicolson
• If It Had Been Discovered in 1930 that Bacon Really Did Write Shakespeare by J. C. Squire
• If Booth had Missed Lincoln by Milton Waldman

A revised edition with the alternate title If: or, History Rewritten was also released by the American publisher Viking in 1931, replacing Ronald Knox's essay with If the Dutch had Kept Nieuw Amsterdam by Hendrik Willem Van Loon, and adding the following older essays:

• If: A Jacobite Fantasy by Charles Petrie (1926)
• If Napoleon had Won the Battle of Waterloo by G. M. Trevelyan (1907)

[edit] External Links

• "If Don John of Austria had Married Mary Queen of Scots" by G. K. Chesterton (scroll to bottom of page)
• First section of text of "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg" by Winston Churchill
• "If: A Jacobite Fantasy" by Charles Petrie
• "If Napoleon had Won the Battle of Waterloo" by G. M. Trevalyan