Confederate and Civil War Alternate Histories [View all]

By Renee de Groot
OCTOBER 20, 2017

... Nearly 150 Civil War alternate histories (CWAHs, for convenience) have been written from 1900 to the present ...

... despite the creative freedom to change history, many CWAHs are surprisingly predictable. In concert, they even become repetitive. The genre purports to change history, but it only does so with deeply familiar images and patterns that are already part of the reader’s historical imagination, which it subverts, reverses, distorts, picks apart, and reassembles into something new-yet-familiar ...

... Winston Churchill (of all people) wrote a 1931 essay called “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” which, as the title suggests, portrays the perspective of a historian in an alternative reality who constructs his own alternate history that corresponds to our history exactly ...

... When the narrator speculates about an alternative (to him) Reconstruction period, he mocks the effort to "graft white democratic institutions upon the simple, docile, gifted African race belonging to a much earlier chapter in human history" ... Different yet honorable, separate but equal. Churchill’s counterfactual speculation is among the most structurally sophisticated CWAHs, yet it has nothing thoughtful to say about the attitudes and historical interpretations prevailing in its own time ...

... If the creators of Confederate want to wade into this, I hope the controversy they aroused motivates them to pause and carefully consider what they are trying to accomplish with an alternative Civil War in our current moment. This is not idle or irrelevant question — as I was writing this essay, Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville over a statue memorializing a failed rebel general. Whatever Confederate has to say, it better be good.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/divided-we-stand-confederate-and-civil-war-alternate-histories/#!