Telling It Like It Wasn’t

Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern day historians, both amateur and professional. We speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. These narratives are often written off as politically inspired fantasy or as pop culture fodder, but in Telling It Like It Wasn’t , Catherine Gallagher takes the history of counterfactual history seriously, pinning it down as an object of dispassionate study. She does