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Informationen zum Autor Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is author of many books including War and Technology (IUP, 2013), Fighting for America: The Struggle for Mastery in North America, 1519-1871 (IUP, 2011), and War and the Cultural Turn. Black is a recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize of the Society for Military History. Klappentext What if there had been no World War I or no Russian Revolution? What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo in 1815, or if Martin Luther had not nailed his complaints to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517, or if the South had won the American Civil War? The questioning of apparent certainties or "known knowns" can be fascinating and, indeed, "What if?" books are very popular. However, this speculative approach, known as counterfactualism, has had limited impact in academic histories, historiography, and the teaching of historical methods. In this book, Jeremy Black offers a short guide to the subject, one that is designed to argue its value as a tool for public and academe alike. Black focuses on the role of counterfactualism in demonstrating the part of contingency, and thus human agency, in history, and the salutary critique the approach offers to determinist accounts of past, present, and future. Inhaltsverzeichnis Preface 1. Introduction 2. A Personal Note on Life and Times 3. Types of History 4. Power and the Struggle for Imperial Mastery 5. The West and the Rest 6. Britain and France, 1688-1815 7. Counterfactualism in Military History 8. Into the Future 9. Skepticism and the Historian 10. Conclusions 11. Postscript Selected Further Reading Index
About the author
Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is author of many books including
War and Technology (IUP, 2013),
Fighting for America: The Struggle for Mastery in North America, 1519-1871 (IUP, 2011), and
War and the Cultural Turn. Black is a recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize of the Society for Military History.
