What If...? Vol. 3: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been

by Robert Cowley (Editor), Murphy Guyer (Reader)

Historians and inquisitive laymen alike love to ponder the dramatic what-ifs of history. In these never-before-published essays, some of the keenest minds of our time ask the big, tantalizing 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. This provocative collection of essays features today's foremost historians speculating on these "what ifs", providing a fascinating new perspective on history's most pivotal events. The essays * Infectious The Plague that Saved Jerusalem
by William H. McNeil * No Glory That Was The Persians Win at Salamis
by Victor Davis Hanson * Conquest Alexander the Great's Premature Death
by Josiah Ober * Furor The Teutoburg
by Lewis Lapham * The Dark Ages Made The Consequences of Two Defeats
by Barry S. Strauss * The Death that Saved The Mongols Turn Back
by Cecilia Holland * If Only It Had Not Been Such a Wet Summer
by Theodore K. Rabb * The Immolation of Hernán Cortés
by Ross Hassig

Audio Cassette

First published June 1, 2000

About the author

Robert Cowley is an American military historian, who writes on topics in American and European military history ranging from the Civil War through World War II. He has held several senior positions in book and magazine publishing and is the founding editor of the award-winning MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History; Cowley has also written extensively and edited three collections of essays in counterfactual history known as What If?

As part of his research he has traveled the entire length of the Western Front, from the North Sea to the Swiss Border.

He currently lives in New York and Connecticut.

-Wikipedia

Reviews

[Robert Brents · Rating 3 out of 5]

The structure of the chapters made it difficult to follow - when were they talking about the way it actually happened, and when were they doing their contrafactual speculating? The relative shortness of each essay meant the writers could not go into as much depth in supporting their contrafactual speculations as the thoroughness of the book-length "Confederate States of America" which I read recently.