Alternative history
From Freepedia
Alternative history or alternate history usually denotes a history told from an alternative viewpoint, rather than from the view of imperialist, conqueror, or explorer. For example A People's History of the United States as a view sympathetic to people indigenous to the Americas, or Herstory as a history from a female perspective.
This falls into two major categorise:
- Historical revisionism is the reexamination of the accepted "facts" and interpretations of history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more accurate, and less biased information.
- When revisionism takes on a partisan tone, it is usually called polictical historical revisionism i.e. a construction of past events which is refuted by well documented, verifiable, and very broadly accepted sources. Such histories may tend to explain away their lack of scholarship or documentation on a conspiracy to erase such evidence.
- Fiction and non-fiction
Other alternative histories include:
- Failed history covers events that have been predicted and had items created in the expectation of them occurring, but which then in fact did not occur.
- Virtual history *also known as counterfactual history) is a form of history which attempts to answer "what if" questions. It is an academic extrapolation of alternate outcomes of historical events.
- A genre of speculative fiction is fictious alternative history is fiction that is set in a world in which history has diverged from history as it is generally known. Also uchronia refers to a hypothetical time period of our world.
