Alternate history

But no opinion can grasp how it can come about that it was not founded long ago...[21]One early work of fiction detailing an alternate history is Joanot Martorell's 1490 epic romance Tirant lo Blanch, which was written when the fall of Constantinople to the Turks was still a recent and traumatic memory for Christian Europe.

One of the earliest works of alternate history published in large quantities for the reception of a large audience may be Louis Geoffroy's Histoire de la Monarchie universelle : Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812–1832) (History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoleon and the Conquest of the World) (1836), which imagines Napoleon's First French Empire emerging victorious in the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and in an invasion of England in 1814, later unifying the world under Bonaparte's rule.

In the 2005 biography Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Bushman wrote that the Book of Mormon "turned American history upside down [and] works on the premise that a history—a book—can reconstitute a nation.

It recounts the tale of a man who is considered "a madman" due to his perceptions of a different 1845, a reality in which long-dead famous people, such as the poets Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats, the actor Edmund Kean, the British politician George Canning, and Napoleon Bonaparte, are still alive.

The essays range from serious scholarly efforts to Hendrik Willem van Loon's fanciful and satiric portrayal of an independent 20th-century New Amsterdam, a Dutch city-state on the island of Manhattan.

The protagonist, the autodidact Hodgins Backmaker, travels back to the aforementioned battle and inadvertently changes history, which results in the emergence of our own timeline and the consequent victory of the Union instead.

World War II produced alternate history for propaganda: both British and American[29] authors wrote works depicting Nazi invasions of their respective countries as cautionary tales.

Time travel as the cause of a point of divergence (POD), which can denote either the bifurcation of a historical timeline or a simple replacement of the future that existed before the time-travelling event, has continued to be a popular theme.

Philip K. Dick's novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962), is an alternate history in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won World War II.

believe that the references to a counter-earth suggest that the world portrayed in Ada is a delusion in the mind of the hero (another favorite theme of Dick's novels[citation needed]).

Like history, science has followed a divergent path on Anti-Terra: it boasts all the same technology as our world, but all based on water instead of electricity; e.g., when a character in Ada makes a long-distance call, all the toilets in the house flush at once to provide hydraulic power.

Kingsley Amis set his novel, The Alteration (1976), in the 20th century, but major events in the Reformation did not take place, and Protestantism is limited to the breakaway Republic of New England.

In Nick Hancock and Chris England's 1997 book What Didn't Happen Next: An Alternative History of Football it is suggested that, had Gordon Banks been fit to play in the 1970 FIFA World Cup quarter-final, there would have been no Thatcherism and the post-war consensus would have continued indefinitely.

In 1986, a sixteen-part epic comic book series called Captain Confederacy began examining a world where the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War.

[citation needed] Other stories by Turtledove include A Different Flesh, in which the Americas were not populated from Asia during the last ice age; In the Presence of Mine Enemies, in which the Nazis won World War II;[citation needed] and Ruled Britannia, in which the Spanish Armada succeeded in conquering England in the Elizabethan era, with William Shakespeare being given the task of writing the play that will motivate the Britons to rise up against their Spanish conquerors.

In some versions, the Nazis and/or Axis Powers win; or in others, they conquer most of the world but a "Fortress America" exists under siege;[citation needed] while in others,[specify] there is a Nazi/Japanese Cold War comparable to the US/Soviet equivalent in 'our' timeline.

[41] Beginning with The Probability Broach in 1980, L. Neil Smith wrote several novels that postulated the disintegration of the US Federal Government after Albert Gallatin joins the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 and eventually leads to the creation of a libertarian utopia.

In Eric Flint's 1632 series, a small town in West Virginia is transported to 17th century central Europe and drastically changes the course of the Thirty Years' War, which was then underway.

John Birmingham's Axis of Time trilogy deals with the culture shock when a United Nations naval task force from 2021 finds itself back in 1942 helping the Allies against the Empire of Japan and the Germans (and doing almost as much harm as good in spite of its advanced weapons).

[46] Through crowdfunding on Kickstarter, Alan Jenkins and Gan Golan produced a graphic novel series called 1/6 depicting a dystopian alternate reality in which the January 6 United States Capitol attack was successful.

Under Donald Trump's second term as president, a solid gold statue of him is erected and armed thugs patrol the streets of Washington DC suppressing civilian resistance with brutal violence under the banner of the Confederate flag.

Randall Garrett's "Lord Darcy" series presents a point of divergence: a monk systemizes magic rather than science, so the use of foxglove to treat heart disease is regarded as superstition.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke takes place in an England where a separate Kingdom ruled by the Raven King and founded on magic existed in Northumbria for over 300 years.

The Tales of Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card (a parallel to the life of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement) takes place in an alternate America, beginning in the early 19th century.

Prior to that time, a POD occurred: England, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, had banished "makers", or anyone else demonstrating "knacks" (an ability to perform seemingly supernatural feats) to the North American continent.

The political division of the continent is considerably altered, with two large English colonies bookending a smaller "American" nation, one aligned with England, and the other governed by exiled Cavaliers.

Actual historical figures are seen in a much different light: Ben Franklin is revered as the continent's finest "maker", George Washington was executed after being captured, and "Tom" Jefferson is the first president of "Appalachia", the result of a compromise between the Continentals and the British Crown.

[48] Twelve years later, author Hiroshi Aramata wrote the groundbreaking Teito Monogatari which reimagined the history of Tokyo across the 20th century in a world heavily influenced by the supernatural.

Noughts + Crosses is a British TV show set on a world where a powerful West African empire colonizes Europe 700 years before the start of the series.

[59][60] In Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, and Galician, the words uchronie, ucronia, and ucronía are native versions of alternate history, from which comes the English loanword uchronia.