ABSTRACT
In this contribution, I provide a comprehensive overview of the historical discipline’s final frontier, counterfactual history. After providing a systematic definition of counterfactual history, I go on to discuss the genre by showing how its various forms can be classified within an elaborate typology. I identify seven different categories of historical counterfactuals: Causal, judgmental, temporal, spatial, existential, mannerist, and quasi. Within each of these categories, I identify more than two dozen different types of counterfactuals, which I classify with descriptive names and illustrate with specific examples from classic and recent works of historiography. The different types of counterfactuals vary in numerous ways, but they are all linked by their rhetorical elements. These elements, in turn, help explain the present-day popularity of wondering how history might have been different within western culture.
