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What If book cover 1
What If book cover 2
What If
Series · 2 books · 1999-2000

Books in series

What If? book cover
#1

What If?

The World's Foremost Historians Imagine What Might Have Been

1999

Historians and inquisitive laymen alike love to ponder the dramatic what-its of history. In these twenty never-before-published essays, some of the keenest minds of our time ask the big, tantalizing questions: Where might we be if history had not unfolded the way it did? Why, how, and when was our fortune made real? The answers are surprising, sometimes frightening, and always entertaining..
What If? 2 book cover
#2

What If? 2

Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been

2000

What if Lincoln didn't abolish slavery? What if an assassin succeeded in killing FDR in 1933? This volume presents 25 intriguing "what if..." scenarios by some of today's greatest historical minds. A second volume of historical speculation by experts in the field wonders what if Socrates had died on the battlefield at Delium or Eisenhower had finished off the Nazis in 1944, among other intriguing scenarios. Contents: Socrates dies at Delium, 424 B.C. / Victor Davis Hanson—Not by a nose : the triumph of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, 31 B.C. / Josiah Ober—Pontius Pilate spares Jesus / Carlos M.N. Eire—Repulse at Hastings, October 14, 1066 / Cecelia Holland—The Chinese discovery of the New World, 15th century / Theodore F. Cook, Jr.— Martin Luther burns at the stake, 1521 / Geoffrey Parker—If Charles I had not left Whitehall, August 1641 / Theodore K. Rabb—Napoleon's invasion of North America / Thomas Fleming—If Lincoln had not freed the slaves / Tom Wicker—France turns the other cheek, July 1870 / Alistair Horne—The election of Theodore Roosevelt, 1912 / John Lukacs—The Great War torpedoed / Robert L. O'Connell—No Finland Station / George Feifer—The luck of Franklin Delano Roosevelt / Geoffrey C. Ward—The War of 1938 / Williamson Murray—Prime Minister Halifax : Great Britain makes peace with Germany, 1940 / Andrew Roberts—The boys who saved Australia, 1942 / James Bradley—Enigma uncracked / David Kahn—Pius XII protests the Holocaust / Robert Katz—VE Day—November 11, 1944 / Caleb Carr—The Führer in the dock / Roger Spiller—No bomb—no end : the Operation Olympic disaster, Japan 1945 / Richard B. Frank—The presidency of Henry Wallace / James Chace—A tale of three congressmen, 1948 : America without Nixon, Johnson, and Kennedy / Lance Morrow—What if Pizarro had not found potatoes in Peru? / William H. McNeill.

Authors

Caleb Carr
Caleb Carr
Author · 12 books
Caleb Carr is an American novelist and military historian. The son of Lucien Carr, a former UPI editor and a key Beat generation figure, he was born in Manhattan and lived for much of his life on the Lower East Side. He attended Kenyon College and New York University, earning a B.A. in military and diplomatic history. He is a contributing editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and writes frequently on military and political affairs.
Carlos M.N. Eire
Author · 4 books

Author also writes under Carlos Eire A scholar of the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, Carlos Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History & Religious Studies at Yale University. He received his PhD from Yale in 1979, and taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia before joining the Yale faculty in 1996.

Robert L. O'Connell
Robert L. O'Connell
Author · 9 books

Robert L. O’Connell was educated at Colgate University and the University of Virginia, where he received a Ph.D. in history. He worked for three decades in the U.S. Intelligence Community, before becoming a Visiting Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California. He has two grown children and lives with his wife in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the author of six published histories and one novel. Besides Fierce Patriot, the Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman (Random House, 2014), he has also written The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (Random House,, 2010), Soul of the Sword (The Free Press, 2002), Ride of the Second Horseman: the Birth and Death of War (Oxford University Press, 1995), Sacred Vessels: the Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S. Navy (Oxford University Press, 1993), Of Arms and Men; a History of War, Weapons and Aggression (Oxford University Press, 1989), and Fast Eddie: a Novel in Many Voices(Morrow, 1999).

Barry S. Strauss
Barry S. Strauss
Author · 10 books
Barry Strauss, professor of history and classics at Cornell University, is a leading expert on ancient military history. He has written or edited several books, including The Battle of Salamis, The Trojan War, The Spartacus War, Masters of Command, The Death of Caesar, and Ten Caesars.
David McCullough
David McCullough
Author · 21 books
David McCullough was a Yale-educated, two-time recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize (Truman; John Adams) and the National Book Award (The Path Between the Seas; Mornings on Horseback). His many other highly-acclaimed works of historical non-fiction include The Greater Journey, 1776, Brave Companions, The Great Bridge, The Wright Brothers, and The Johnstown Flood. He was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the National Humanities Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in addition to many other awards and honors. Mr. McCullough lived in Boston, Mass.
Stephen W. Sears
Stephen W. Sears
Author · 19 books

Stephen Ward Sears is an American historian specializing in the American Civil War. A graduate of Lakewood High School and Oberlin College, Sears attended a journalism seminar at Radcliffe-Harvard. As an author he has concentrated on the military history of the American Civil War, primarily the battles and leaders of the Army of the Potomac. He was employed as editor of the Educational Department at the American Heritage Publishing Company. Sears resides in Norwalk, Connecticut.

James Chace
Author · 3 books
James Clarke Chace was an American historian, writing on American diplomacy and statecraft.
Geoffrey Parker
Geoffrey Parker
Author · 18 books

Geoffrey Parker is Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History and an Associate of the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University. He has published widely on the social, political and military history of early modern Europe, and in 2012 the Royal Dutch Academy recognized these achievements by awarding him its biennial Heineken Foundation Prize for History, open to scholars in any field, and any period, from any country. Parker has written or co-written thirty-nine books, including The Military Revolution: Military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), winner of the 'best book prize' from both the American Military Institute and the Society for the History of Technology; The Grand Strategy of Philip II (Yale University Press, 1998), which won the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society of Military History; and Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013), which won the Society of Military History’s Distinguished Book Prize and also one of the three medals awarded in 2014 by the British Academy for ‘a landmark academic achievement… which has transformed understanding of a particular subject’. Before moving to Ohio State in 1997, Parker taught at Cambridge and St Andrews universities in Britain, at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and at Illinois and Yale Universities in the United States, teaching courses on the Reformation, European history and military history at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He has directed or co-directed over thirty Doctoral Dissertations to completion, as well as several undergraduate theses. In 2006 he won an OSU Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, and has four children. In 1987 he was diagnosed as having Multiple Sclerosis. His latest book is Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II (Yale University Press, 2014).

Richard B. Frank
Author · 5 books
Born in 1947, Richard B. Frank graduated from the University of Missouri and served for almost four years in the United States Army, including a tour of duty in Vietnam as an aerorifle platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division. After his discharge, Frank earned his J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 1976 and worked for several years as an attorney.
David Clay Large
David Clay Large
Author · 9 books
David Clay Large is a senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and professor of history at the Fromm Institute, University of San Francisco. He has also taught at Smith College, Yale University, and Montana State University.
Alistair Horne
Alistair Horne
Author · 19 books
Sir Alistair Allan Horne was an English journalist, biographer and historian of Europe, especially of 19th and 20th century France. He wrote more than 20 books on travel, history, and biography. He won the following awards: Hawthornden Prize, 1963, for The Price of Glory; Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize and Wolfson Literary Award, both 1978, both for A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962; French Légion d'Honneur, 1993, for work on French history;and Commander of the British Empire (CBE), 2003.
William H. McNeill
William H. McNeill
Author · 18 books

aka William Hardy McNeill was a historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West (1963). He was the Robert A. Milikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987. In addition to winning the U.S. National Book Award in History and Biography in 1964 for The Rise of the West, McNeill received several other awards and honors. In 1985 he served as president of the American Historical Association. In 1996, McNeill won the prestigious Erasmus Prize, which the Crown Prince of the Netherlands Willem-Alexander presented to him at Amsterdam's Royal Palace. In 1999, Modern Library named The Rise of the West of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the 20th century. In 2009, he won the National Humanities Medal. In February 2010, President Barack Obama, a former University of Chicago professor himself, awarded McNeill the National Humanities Medal to recognize "his exceptional talent as a teacher and scholar at the University of Chicago and as an author of more than 20 books, including The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963), which traces civilizations through 5,000 years of recorded history".

Josiah Ober
Josiah Ober
Author · 9 books
Josiah Ober is Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professor in honor of Constantine Mitsotakis, and Professor of Classics and Political Science, at Stanford University.
George Feifer
Author · 5 books
George Feifer was a journalist and author who wrote about the Soviet Union.
David Kahn
Author · 12 books

David Kahn is a historian who writes on military codebreaking. He earned a D.Phil in modern German history from Oxford University in 1974 under the supervision of the then-Regius professor of modern history, Hugh Trevor-Roper. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Geoffrey C. Ward
Geoffrey C. Ward
Author · 16 books

Geoffrey Champion Ward is an author and screenwriter of various documentary presentations of American history. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1962. He was an editor of American Heritage magazine early in his career. He wrote the television mini-series The Civil War with its director Ken Burns and has collaborated with Burns on every documentary he has made since, including Jazz and Baseball. This work won him five Emmy Awards. The most recent Burns/Ward collaboration, The War, premiered on PBS in September 2007. In addition he co-wrote The West, of which Ken Burns was an executive producer, with fellow historian Dayton Duncan.

Cecelia Holland
Cecelia Holland
Author · 41 books

Pen name used by Elizabeth Eliot Carter. Cecelia Holland is one of the world's most highly acclaimed and respected historical novelists, ranked by many alongside other giants in that field such as Mary Renault and Larry McMurtry. Over the span of her thirty year career, she's written almost thirty historical novels, including The Firedrake, Rakessy, Two Ravens, Ghost on the Steppe, Death of Attila, Hammer For Princes, The King's Road, Pillar of the Sky, The Lords of Vaumartin, Pacific Street, Sea Beggars, The Earl, The King in Winter, The Belt of Gold, The Serpent Dreamer, The High City, Kings of the North, and a series of fantasy novels, including The Soul Thief, The Witches Kitchen, The Serpent Dreamer, and Varanger. She also wrote the well-known science fiction novel Floating Worlds, which was nominated for a Locus Award in 1975. Her most recent book is a new fantasy novel, Dragon Heart.

Lewis H. Lapham
Lewis H. Lapham
Author · 34 books

Lewis Henry Lapham was the editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and again from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder and current editor of Lapham's Quarterly, featuring a wide range of famous authors devoted to a single topic in each issue. Lapham has also written numerous books on politics and current affairs. Lapham's Quarterly http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/

Thomas Fleming
Author · 1 books
Thomas Fleming is the editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and the president of The Rockford Institute in Rockford, Illinois.
John Lukacs
John Lukacs
Author · 26 books

Lukacs was born in Budapest to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother. His parents divorced before the Second World War. During the Second World War he was forced to serve in a Hungarian labour battalion for Jews. During the German occupation of Hungary in 1944-45 he evaded deportation to the death camps, and survived the siege of Budapest. In 1946, as it became clear that Hungary was going to be a repressive Communist regime, he fled to the United States. In the early 1950s however, Lukacs wrote several articles in Commonweal criticizing the approach taken by Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he described as a vulgar demagogue.[1] Lukacs sees populism as the greatest threat to civilization. By his own description, he considers himself to be a reactionary. He claims that populism is the essence of both National Socialism and Communism. He denies that there is such a thing as generic fascism, noting for example that the differences between the political regimes of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy are greater than their similarities.[2] A major theme in Lukacs' writing is his agreement with the assertion by the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville that aristocratic elites have been replaced by democratic elites, which obtain power via an appeal to the masses. In his 2002 book, At the End of an Age, Lukacs argued that the modern/bourgeois age, which began around the time of the Renaissance, is coming to an end.[3] The rise of populism and the decline of elitism is the theme of his experimental work, A Thread of Years (1998), a series of vignettes set in each year of the 20th century from 1900 to 1998, tracing the abandonment of gentlemanly conduct and the rise of vulgarity in American culture. Lukacs defends traditional Western civilization against what he sees as the leveling and debasing effects of mass culture. By his own admission a dedicated Anglophile, Lukacs’s favorite historical figure is Winston Churchill, whom he considers to be the greatest statesman of the 20th century, and the savior of not only Great Britain, but also of Western civilization. A recurring theme in his writing is the duel between Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler for mastery of the world. The struggle between them, whom Lukacs sees as the archetypical reactionary and the archetypical revolutionary, is the major theme of The Last European War (1976), The Duel (1991), Five Days in London (1999) and 2008's Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat, a book about Churchill’s first major speech as Prime Minister. Lukacs argues that Great Britain (and by extension the British Empire) could not defeat Germany by itself, winning required the entry of the United States and the Soviet Union, but he contends that Churchill, by ensuring that Germany failed to win the war in 1940, laid the groundwork for an Allied victory. Lukacs holds strong isolationist beliefs, and unusually for an anti-Communist émigré, "airs surprisingly critical views of the Cold War from a unique conservative perspective."[4] Lukacs claims that the Soviet Union was a feeble power on the verge of collapse, and contended that the Cold War was an unnecessary waste of American treasure and life. Likewise, Lukacs has also condemned the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In his 1997 book, George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment, 1944-1946, a collection of letters between Lukacs and his close friend George F. Kennan exchanged in 1994-1995, Lukacs and Kennan criticized the New Left claim that the Cold War was caused by the United States. Lukacs argued however that although it was Joseph Stalin who was largely responsible for the beginning of the Cold War, the administration of Dwight Eisenhower missed a chance for ending the Cold War in 1953 after Stalin's death, and as a consequence the Cold War went on for many more decades.

Tom Wicker
Tom Wicker
Author · 10 books

Also wrote under the pseudonym Paul Connolly. Thomas Grey Wicker’s respected talent as a journalist took him from his origins in Hamlet, North Carolina, to The New York Times. There he served as associate editor, former Washington bureau chief, as well as the author of the famous op-ed column “In the Nation” for thirty years. He was the author of a considerable number of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction books as well. Wicker earned his journalism degree from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in 1948, and at first wrote for papers in Aberdeen and Lumberton. He wrote for the Winston-Salem Journal for eight years and The Nashville Tennessean for two years before heading up to the Times, where he eventually retired in 1991. Wicker’s famous report on the assassination of President Kennedy, written from the perspective of the motorcade following the president, has been praised as the most accurate firsthand account of the shooting.

Andrew Roberts
Andrew Roberts
Author · 34 books
Dr Andrew Roberts, who was born in 1963, took a first class honours degree in Modern History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, from where he is an honorary senior scholar and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). He has written or edited twelve books, and appears regularly on radio and television around the world. Based in New York, he is an accomplished public speaker, and is represented by HarperCollins Speakers’ Bureau (See Speaking Engagements and Speaking Testimonials). He has recently lectured at Yale, Princeton and Stanford Universities and at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming
Author · 46 books

Librarian note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name Thomas James Fleming was an historian and historical novelist, with a special interest in the American Revolution. He was born in 1927 in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of a World War I hero who was a leader in Jersey City politics for three decades. Before her marriage, his mother, Katherine Dolan Fleming, was a teacher in the Jersey City Public School System. After graduating from St. Peter's Preparatory School in Jersey City, Fleming spent a year in the United States Navy. He received a Bachelor's degree, with honors, from Fordham University in 1950. After brief stints as a newspaperman and magazine editor, he became a full-time writer in 1960. His first history book, Now We Are Enemies, an account of the Battle of Bunker Hill, was published that same year. It was a best-seller, reviewed in more than 75 newspapers and featured as a main selection of the Literary Guild. Fleming published books about various events and figures of the Revolutionary era. He also wrote about other periods of American history and wrote over a dozen well-received novels set against various historical backgrounds. He said, "I never wanted to be an Irish American writer, my whole idea was to get across that bridge and be an American writer". Fleming died at his home in New York City on July 23, 2017, at the age of 90.

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