Sneak Preview of Predicting the Past: Counterfactual History from Antiquity to the Present

For those of you who have wondered where I’ve been hiding (and I admit it’s been a while), I’ve been putting the finishing touches on my massive new book on the origins and evolution of counterfactual history. 

Entitled Predicting the Past, the book will appear next spring in two – yes, two! – volumes.  The first is called Predicting the Past: Counterfactual History from Antiquity to the French Revolution. The second is called Predicting the Past: Counterfactual History from Napoleon to the Present.   

Here are the current covers: 

The book will be appearing with DeGruyter, and I’m grateful that the press is giving me the opportunity to publish the fullest version of my research and include more than 200 images to boot. 

It’s a big book -- really big.  It clocks in at 780 manuscript pages, not including notes, and covers more than 3,000 years of history from the ancient Sumerians up through the present.  Believe it or not, the manuscript was originally 1350 pages, not including notes, and I had to cut approximately 600 pages worth of text to get it into its present shape.  I won’t say it was easy parting with so much primary source material, but that’s been the case with all the books I’ve ever written.  You’d think I would learn…. 

That said, all is not lost. 

After the book appears, I’ll be using the blog to post material from the cutting room floor that didn’t make it into the final version, but which deserves an audience.  Focusing on everything from the counterfactual reflections of the ancient Hittites to the late 19th century speculations of the American philosopher William James, these short posts will provide further evidence of the book’s underlying thesis – that counterfactuals have been much more present in the western tradition than scholars to date have realized. 

Those of you who have followed the Counterfactual History Review from the beginning know that I created the blog to determine why counterfactuals seemed to be popping up all over the place in contemporary western culture.   

The blog offered me an ideal way to sort through my thoughts about the present, but it ultimately made me realize I had to go back to the beginnings of counterfactual history to put present-day trends in their proper context.  

It’s taken me more than a dozen years to produce Predicting the Past, but it’s been one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve ever worked on. I hope you will feel the same way when – as I hope – you get the book!