Counterfactual History Research Articles

Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, by Ben Carver

Reviewed by: Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America by Ben Carver Christopher Ferguson (bio) Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, by Ben Carver; pp. xviii + 292. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, £79.99, $109.99. In Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America, Ben Carver describes his book as a study of the “nineteenth-century imagination of worlds that history might have produced” (1). Specifically, he analyzes the writing of “alternate histories” and identifies the wider contexts that produced them. Carver defines “alternate histories” as literary works wherein an author identifies a single point of historical divergence (example: Napoleon’s decision to begin his retreat from Moscow in September rather than October of 1812) and from this point imagines all subsequent history evolving in a new direction as a result of this change. (By leaving Russia earlier, the Grande Armée avoids decimation by the Russian winter, and Napoleon remains undefeated and rules over a massive French empire until his death from old age.) Carver contends that a wide variety of nineteenth-century authors—including British journalists, French philosophers, and American housewives—engaged in imaginative rewritings of history not only in order to imagine alternate “forms of society” or “the history of nations that might have followed,” but also as a means of “working with and often testing ideas about cycles of cause and effect that had produced the world they lived in” (5). Nineteenth-century alternate histories thus represented an important medium that allowed reflection on how new forms of knowledge, such as archaeology, astronomy, or the natural sciences, “altered the understanding of the past” (1). Carver’s book is one of several recent works interested in analyzing the production, content, and meaning of fictional histories, with Catherine Gallagher’s Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction (2018) being the most notable among them. Indeed, it is difficult to assess Carver’s study without comparing it with Gallagher’s, and Carver himself notes some important affinities between their [End Page 688] two studies. This includes their shared preference for the phrase “alternate history” as opposed to “alternative history,” the first strictly referencing “a narrative set of circumstances that history might have produced” while the second also potentially encompassing nonfictional accounts which “offer marginal perspectives normally excluded from histories of a subject” (11). Carver’s definition of what constitutes an “alternate history,” however, is more fluid and inclusive. While Gallagher draws clear distinctions between “alternate histories,” “alternate history novels,” and “counterfactual histories” on the basis of both their formal elements and contents (Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction [The University of Chicago Press, 2018], 5), Carver argues that the “boundaries between alternate and counterfactual histories are hard to establish.” Such distinctions, he contends, are “anachronistic” to the study of nineteenth-century “historical imaginaries” because none of these styles had “solidified into a form that [contemporary] writers and readers were conscious of” (12). Despite these differences of definition, Carver and Gallagher analyze many of the same works, including Louis Geoffrey-Château’s Napoléon et la conquête du monde [Napoleon and the Conquest of the World] (1836), Charles Renouvier’s Uchronie [Uchronia] (1857), Auguste Blanqui’s L’éternité par les astres [Eternity According to the Stars] (1872), Edward Everett Hale’s Hands Off (1895), and Edmund Lawrence’s It May Happen Yet: A Tale of Bonaparte’s Invasion of England (1899). These varied works are united not only by their presentation of fictional histories but also by their relative obscurity and the rarity with which they have been utilized by other scholars; the same might be noted about most of the other texts Carver examines, including Richard Whately’s Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte (1819), Benjamin Disraeli’s early novel The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833), an essay on astronomy and the plurality of worlds by Thomas De Quincey (“System of the Heavens As Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes” [1846]), and Mary E. Bradley Lane’s feminist utopia Mizora: A Prophecy...

How historical analysis can enrich scenario planning

AbstractHistorians and scenario planners both examine societal developments over time, but from opposite vantage points. One group looks backward, the other forward. This paper argues that a deeper understanding of the methods and approaches of historical analysis can help scenario planners to develop better insights into the world ahead. The study of history stretches back millennia, while disciplined scenario planning has been around for half a century. By comparing historical analysis with scenario planning, the paper extracts lessons to improve narratives about possible futures, with linkages to the emerging field of counterfactual history. The practical challenges are examined using a 1992 scenario project about South Africa's future post‐apartheid. Reviewing the four scenarios developed then, with the benefit of hindsight now, shows how and why historical thinking can sharpen scenario‐oriented studies of the future.

Reflections on the Popularity of ‘Conspiracy Mentalities’

In this text from a lecture made in 2006, Serge Moscovici (1925–2014) seeks to update his earlier work on the ‘conspiracy mentality’ (Moscovici, 1987) by considering the relationships between social representations and conspiracy mentality. Innovation in this field, Moscovici argues, will require a thorough description and understanding of what conspiracy theories are, what rhetoric they use and what functions they fulfill. Specifically, Moscovici considers conspiracies as a form of counterfactual history implying a more desirable world (in which the conspiracy did not take place) and suggests that social representations theory should tackle this phenomenon. He explicitly links conspiracy theories to works of fiction and suggests that common principles might explain their popularity. Historically, he argues, conspiracism was born twice: first, in the middle ages, when their primary function was to exclude and destroy what was considered as heresy; and second, after the French Revolution, to delegitimize the Enlightenment, which was attributed to a small coterie of reactionaries rather than to the will of the people. Moscovici then considers four aspects (‘thematas’) of conspiracy mentality: 1) the prohibition of knowledge; 2) the duality between the majority (the masses, prohibited to know) and ‘enlightened’ minorities; 3) the search for a common origin, an ‘Ur-phenomenon’ that connects historical events and provides a continuity to history (he notes that such a tendency is also present in social psychological theorizing); and 4) the valorization of tradition as a bulwark against modernity. Some of Moscovici’s insights in this talk have since been borne out by contemporary research on the psychology of conspiracy theories, but many others still remain fascinating potential avenues for future research.

‘A Single Civilian Whore’ – Reflections on the Might-Have-Beens of the Russian Civil War

This essay responds to Jonathan Smele's exercise in counterfactual history, which makes the case that no other contender for power had sufficient organizational capacity or popular appeal to present a viable challenge to Bolshevik victory in the civil war. The Bolsheviks indeed enjoyed various structural and strategic advantages, but they faced powerful opposition. This essay presents the ‘counterfactual’ of the civil war as an actually existing component - the urge to self-representation and social justice expressed by vast segments of the old imperial population. The successful projects of national self-assertion that pressed against the centre can also be seen as really actualized alternatives. The Bolshevik outcome, in this light, appears not as the default, but as the defeat of other plausible futures for the post-imperial Russian state.

More Thoughts on Grandma’s Whiskers

As Jonathan Smele reminds us in this both entertaining and thought-provoking article, counter-factual history can be fun and, as its supporters have suggested, it can provide interesting contingenc...

‘If Grandma had Whiskers … ’: Could the Anti-Bolsheviks have won the Russian Revolutions and Civil Wars? Or, the Constraints and Conceits of Counterfactual History

Recent decades have seen a conspicuous flowering of counterfactual or ‘virtual’ history, nurtured by a fecund mulch of post-modernist critiques of empiricism, the vulnerability of Marxist history (as a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union), and the genre’s voguish allure to the general public. Never immune from such challenges, both exogenous and endogenous, the history of the Russian revolutions and civil wars has long felt their impact, and they have sprouted anew, if somewhat weakly, in some publications linked to the revolution’s centenary. This article examines the roots of these inherently thistly but straggling scions of the counterfactual thicket, as well as explicit dystopias and utopias found in earlier White émigré and Soviet dissident fiction (notably the works of P. N. Krasnov and V. P. Aksenov), before proceeding to test the ‘alternatives to Bolshevism’ suggested more implicitly in Western histories of the period. It finds that these proffered alternatives have been, for the most part, insubstantial but that counterfactual history is not necessarily devoid of utility.

Natural Cybernetics and Mathematical History: The Principle of Least Choice in History

The paper follows the track of a previous paper “Natural cybernetics of time” in relation to history in a research of the ways to be mathematized regardless of being a descriptive humanitarian science withal investigating unique events and thus rejecting any repeatability. The pathway of classical experimental science to be mathematized gradually and smoothly by more and more relevant mathematical models seems to be inapplicable. Anyway quantum mechanics suggests another pathway for mathematization; considering the historical reality as dual or “complimentary” to its model. The historical reality by itself can be seen as mathematical if one considers it in Hegel’s manner as a specific interpretation of the totality being in a permanent self-movement due to being just the totality, i.e. by means of the “speculative dialectics” of history, however realized as a theory both mathematical and empirical and thus falsifiable as by logical contradictions within itself as emprical discrepancies to facts. Not less, a Husserlian kind of “historical phenomenology” is possible along with Hegel’s historical dialectics sharing the postulate of the totality (and thus, that of transcendentalism). One would be to suggest the transcendental counterpart: an “eternal”, i.e. atemporal and aspatial history to the usual, descriptive temporal history, and equating the real course of history as with its alternative, actually happened branches of the regions of the world as with only imaginable, counterfactual histories. That universal and transcendental history is properly mathematical by itself, even in a neo-Pythagorean model. It is only represented on the temporal screen of the standard historiography as a discrete series of unique events. An analogy to the readings of the apparatus in quantum mechanics can be useful. Even more, that analogy is considered rigorously and logically as implied by the mathematical transcendental history and sharing with it the same quantity of information as an invariant to all possible alternative or counterfactual histories. One can involve the hypothetical external viewpoint to history (as if outside of history or from “God’s viewpoint to it), to which all alternative or counterfactual histories can be granted as a class of equivalence sharing the same information (i.e. the number choices, but realized in different sequence or adding redundant ones in each branch) being similar and even mathematically isomorphic to Feynman trajectories in quantum mechanics. Particularly, a fundamental law of mathematical history, the law of least choice of the real historical pathway is deducible from the same approach. Its counterpart in physics is the well-known and confirmed law of least action as far as the quantity of action corresponds equivocally to the quantity of information or that of number elementary historical choices.

Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Edward Sugden

Reviewed by: Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Edward Sugden Hester Blum (bio) Emergent Worlds: Alternative States in Nineteenth-Century American Culture edward sugden New York University Press, 2018 256 pp. Emergent Worlds is an aspirational and counterfactual history of what might have been—and might yet emerge—within the archives of nineteenth-century American literary and cultural study. These emergent worlds include what Edward Sugden calls the “chaotic Pacific,” “long Caribbean,” and the “immigrant Atlantic.” In a book that makes forceful yet elegant interventions into conversations about the timelines of American studies and oceanic forms of relation, Sugden shows a remarkable ability to zoom among various temporal and literary scales, from the quirkily local to the global, from the canonical to the surprisingly marginalized. These scalar shifts emerge from and are focalized on scenes in Herman Melville’s writing in particular, although a range of other authors and texts might be read within such frames. Sugden is interested in the temporal “folds” that preserve traces of liberatory political roads not taken in the early nineteenth century. In his account, the maritime world or oceanic geoculture both enabled such potentialities and rendered them ultimately diaphanous. As an example of how the telescoping methodology of Emergent Worlds functions, here is how Sugden understands Queequeg in Moby-Dick, from the global to the local scale. The Polynesian sailor Queequeg is at large within the “chaotic Pacific,” an interstitial space that is foreclosed by the global events of 1848, which “rationalize” an unruly Pacific cultural system that had previously not been imagined as part of US imperial expansion. With the “comparatively unexpected incursion of the United States onto the west coast,” combined with the gold rush and San Francisco’s emergence as a globally significant port, Sugden writes, “a previously dynamic, fluid, and vibrant ecosystem hardened into a more ossified form” (41). He is interested in what forms of possibility (whether political, imaginative, or individual) exist within these spaces, in which the teleology of US westward expansion was not a given. Within the “chaotic Pacific,” we narrow to focus on a literary form Sugden identifies as the “Pacific elegy” (a coinage that rings sterling to me as a scholar of maritime narratives). In these narratives, capitalistic voyage plans go awry, whether because of storm, [End Page 232] mutiny, or disordered captaincy; in the aftermath, an alternative but unsustainable political reality emerges in concentrated, localized form. Inevitably, “the standardizing energies of global capitalism, the nation-state, and imperialism” impose themselves on this transitional world of possibility, and the Pacific elegy ends with the collapse of chaotic potentiality into “the mute, indifferent ocean” (73). In their literary form, Pacific elegies such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater “archived this early Pacific world in the hope that it might one day be resurrected” (43). From the chaotic Pacific to the Pacific elegy, Sugden’s analysis narrows still further to the figure of the “queer migrant” in this ocean. The queer migrant is appealingly described as a character who is “antischematic, irreverent toward authority, transformative, self-sacrificial, blithe, friendly, trusting, ephemeral, migratory, and doomed” (79). We see queer migrants in the paired figures of Queequeg and Ishmael, and Ahab and Pip, Sugden writes. The queerness of these relationships is not a new critical insight, but their relationship to Pacific forms of mobility, contingency, and loss very much is. The tragedy of the queer migrants found in Pacific elegiac tales within a chaotic Pacific is that the new order their characters exemplify can only be identified in their loss or death. Queequeg’s tattoos—unreadable to the character himself—narrate “a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth,” as Melville writes (qtd. in Sugden 82). As Sugden concludes from this example, “[T]he potential worlds that the early Pacific invoked were complete and self-sustaining, yet, in spite of this fact, not only basically unreadable with the codification of Pacific space but also doomed to be lost, as that oceanic world, predicated on change, was consequently every bit as ephemeral as human skin” (82). Emergent Worlds is characterized by such inventive categorical...

Playing the Past and Alternative Futures: Counterfactual History in Fallout 4

This article explores representations of history and history for the present in Fallout 4 to illuminate how the gameworld makes clever use of common historical tropes and aesthetics, as well as the genre of the counterfactual in its presentation of a compelling and interactive narrative. Set in the post-apocalyptic landscape of Massachusetts, Fallout 4 employs various sites of historical Massachusetts (Concord, Lexington, Boston) in order to draw the user into the story of the ‘lone survivor,’ the avatar that he or she takes control of. This analysis is interested in the ways that Fallout 4 employs history and the genre of the counterfactual in the production of a compelling narrative that not only invites but impels the player into action to chart a new course for this devastated virtual landscape. The power of counterfactual history lies in its capacity to unravel assumptions about the static nature of historical events, and in its denial of a linear trajectory of history broadly. In the case of Fallout 4, the implementation of a counterfactual story, wherein the nuclear event that shrouded the Cold War period in uncertainty, takes place. It serves as a rejection of the popularly rehearsed narrative of American supremacy triumphing over Communist forces to present the player with a more nuanced interpretation of some of the internal and external tensions that came to define the Cold War period (i.e. cultural malaise, economic instability, the growth of a military-industrial complex). This conflicting presentation of histories both real and imagined provides an opportunity for the player to experience and interact with the game critically as a counterfactual reimagining of the Cold War era. Viewed in this way, the virtual world of Fallout 4 becomes a space where the player can reassess their own understanding of the period, and the nature of historical knowledge production more broadly.

Taste, Without Distinction

The phenomenon of the unprecedented sales success of Latin American and South Asian authors from García Márquez and Allende to Rushdie and Roy has had a disproportionate impact on models of the circulation of the literatures from the periphery in core markets. Yet what if these models err in extrapolating from the Latin American and South Asian booms the assumption of a single world market, perhaps even a single international literary field? This essay questions the evenness and general applicability of Bourdieu’s theory of taste to international publishing. Casanova, Moretti and Walkowitz describe a global publishing market, but how even is it? What is the impact of more national and local dynamics? Can publishers of foreign fiction really translate symbolic capital into commercial capital in the form of sales? The archival collection of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, registering the lack of demand for vernacular fiction from Latin America and South Asia well into the 1950s and 1960s, provides a counterfactual history. In postwar American foreign lists, the pressure to domesticate was not to an international literary field, but to the very specific fissures and pressures of an American market. An author did not write for translation per se, but for translation into American English and the New York market, or into Parisian French with its attendant editorial practices. Each literary field requires its own description. We need counterintuitive literary histories where it is not the unprecedented success of García Márquez or Rushdie that needs to be explained, but rather, how they and their precursors came to be published at all. We need accounts of the production, not merely the reception, of these works. Scholars must ask which foreign market an “international” author and supporting coterie of agents, translators and publishers is writing for.

Facts, Fictions, Counterfactuals

The facts of history have long been thought of as Contingent:Not determined by unchanging laws of nature or by divine will but instead produced by human beings, who are limited by circumstances yet capable of agency. The belief in the contingency of historical facts is an invitation to speculate about what might have happened instead, and the thought experiments we call counterfactual history accept that invitation by imagining alternative historical events. Before the scientific revolution, contingency was thought to be a characteristic of facts in general: the word fact was used mainly to describe the time-bound and particular deeds of humankind as opposed to the eternal and general truths of nature. The scientific revolution marked the beginning of a long process in which modern thinkers gradually developed the concept of the fact to mean any observable, freestanding, particular occurrence in history or nature. The idea that there were natural, as well as historical, facts became acceptable, whereas earlier it would have seemed self-contradictory (Shapiro).

An unappreciated merit of counterfactual histories of science

This paper critically engages with Ian Hesketh's (2016) analysis of counterfactual histories of science. According to such analysis, extant counterfactual histories—especially of biology—have a rather conservative flavor, since due to the authors' concern for plausibility, they typically converge on actual science, in the sense that their endpoints coincide with (or are very similar to) those of the corresponding actual scientific developments. As a result, Hesketh argues, not only does the ambition—often proclaimed—to exhibit the centrality of contingency in history of science remain unfulfilled: counterfactual narratives in the history of biology also end up with valuing the past in view of its contribution to the establishment of present-day science. Contrary to this analysis, we contend that an unappreciated merit of counterfactual histories of science converging on actual science lies in the fact that they put present science in a different light, since by being approached from a counterfactual angle, differing from established history, present-day science appears in a new perspective.

Narratives of rupture: Tarantino’s counterfactual histories and the American historical imaginary

ABSTRACTThis article examines the way in which alternate history narratives have the potential to teach a different kind of historical consciousness. The author argues that the way in which films such as Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained rupture from widely accepted narratives of the past can create the potential for challenges to the historical imaginary, shape new ways of relating to the past, and make visible contemporary viewers’ role as historical subjects. The historical imaginary is a culturally shared popular understanding of the past created by discourses of entertainment, politics, and education, and its narratives are highly resistant to challenges from traditional methods of history. The author examines the way each of Quentin Tarantino’s alternate history films uses form, aesthetic, and plot to challenge widely accepted narratives of World War II and the history of slavery in the United States. Both films serve as examinations of the role of collaborators or passive bystanders in enabling atrocities of the past, and potentially create space for audiences to consider their own culpability in contemporary state violence. Finally, this article argues that works of alternate history have the potential to foment a new kind of historical consciousness.

Introduction

Catherine Gallagher's importance as a scholar of nineteenth-century British culture and a historian and theorist of the novel makes the appearance of a new monograph by her an event for Victorianists (among others). This is true even when few of the materials she discusses are, strictly speaking, Victorian, as is the case with her new book, Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. In Telling It Like It Wasn't, Gallagher traces the emergence and development of analytic and narrative discourses premised on counterfactual-historical hypotheses. As the author explains, these hypotheses are past-tense, conditional conjectures “pursued when the antecedent condition is known to be contrary to fact,” such as, to take her two major examples, What if the South won the Civil War? and What if the Nazis had invaded Britain? Bringing together what Gallagher calls “counterfactual histories,” which are more analytical than narrative and typically consider multiple unrealized possibilities; works of “alternate history,” which describe one continuous sequence of departures from the historical record but draw their dramatis personae exclusively from that record; and “the alternate-history novel, [which] invents not only alternative-historical trajectories but also fictional characters,” Telling It Like It Wasn't explores the distinctive uses and dynamic interactions of these forms over the past two centuries and considers their implications for our understanding of more conventional fiction and historiography.

Motives and merits of counterfactual histories of science

I consider the motives of historians devising counterfactual histories, analyze the narrative structure of these histories, and assess their merits. Richard Evans attacked counterfactual histories as motivated by wishful thinking. And he claimed that they could not contribute anything to the understanding of the past because they are concerned “with pointing out supposedly preferable alternatives.” Both claims can be refuted with two particular counterfactual histories of biology. An analysis of the narrative structure of counterfactual histories suggests objective criteria that can distinguish those that have been designed, in order to reach a certain narrative ending, from those that were open-ended at the beginning. These criteria are then applied to two examples from the history of biology: Bowler's Darwin Deleted and Radick's ‘Other Histories, Other Biologies.’ Radick did not determine his counterfactual in advance, to meet a certain narrative ending. This refutes the first claim (wishful thinking). Bowler self-avowedly did design his counterfactual in advance, but its narrative ending still contributes to understanding. In particular, it shows that the idea of natural selection is not necessarily associated with its social discontents. This refutes the second claim (cannot contribute to understanding).

Under the Rising Wave. How Disaggregated Revenue Sources Can Tell Another Story for Québec’s Top Income Share

Top income investigations usually rely on types of earnings that remain at a tively aggregated level. Using a novel disaggregated dataset for Québec’s top earners, we map the recent evolution of different types of income for the top one percent. Hidden under the steady increase of the top income share, we find that there has been very divergent and sharp rises of different revenue sources at specific moments. When looking at disaggregated data, composition effects and historical counterfactuals in Québec invalidate market-based theories like globalization and skilled biased technical change, but not institution-based theories like financialization, taxation and union strength.

The effects of combined-cycle generation and hydraulic fracturing on the price for coal, oil, and natural gas: Implications for carbon taxes

We identify how the increased efficiency of generating electricity using gas-fired combined-cycle technology and the increased production of natural gas due to hydraulic fracturing in the US affect the first purchase price for coal, oil, and natural gas and their prices at electricity generating plants by estimating a cointegrating vector autoregression model from monthly observations between January 1991 and February 2016. Simulation experiments indicate that combined-cycle generation raises the long-run price of natural gas, both at the wellhead and electricity generating plants. Conversely, the increased production of natural gas has a relatively small long-run effect on natural gas prices. Historical counterfactuals indicate increased natural gas production since June 2003 lowers natural gas prices by an average of $0.16 per million BTU while combined cycle generation increases prices by an average of $0.54 per million BTU since April 1999. This increase is captured by natural gas producers such that the margin between prices at electricity generating plants and the wellhead shrinks by about $0.05 per million BTU. This analysis suggests that market relations among energy prices and their statistical ordering will reinforce the direct effects of a carbon tax on relative prices in ways that enhance interfuel substitution towards natural gas.

So close no matter how far: counterfactuals in history of science and the inevitability/contingency controversy

This paper has a twofold purpose. First, it aims at highlighting one difference (albeit in degree and not in kind) in how counterfactuals work in general history, on the one hand, and in history of the natural sciences, on the other hand. As we show, both in general history and in history of science good counterfactual narratives need to be plausible, where plausibility is construed as appropriate continuity of both the antecedent and the consequent of the counterfactual with what we know about the world. However, in general history it is often possible to imagine a consequent dramatically different from the actual historical development, and yet plausible; in history of science, due to plausibility concerns, imagining a consequent far removed from the results of actual science seems more complicated. The second aim of the paper is to assess whether and to what degree counterfactual histories of science can advance the cause of the so-called “contingency thesis,” namely, the claim that history of science might have followed a path leading to alternative, non-equivalent theories, as successful as the ones that we currently embrace. We distinguish various versions of the contingency thesis and argue that counterfactual histories of science support weak versions of the thesis.

Possible Worlds of History

Abstract The theory of possible worlds has been minimally employed in the field of theory and philosophy of history, even though it has found a place as a tool in other areas of philosophy. Discussion has mostly focused on arguments concerning counterfactual history’s status as either useful or harmful. The theory of possible worlds can, however be used also to analyze historical writing. The concept of textual possible worlds offers an interesting framework to work with for analyzing a historical text’s characteristics and features. However, one of the challenges is that the literary theory’s notion of possible worlds is that they are metaphorical in nature. This in itself is not problematic but while discussing about history, which arguably deals with the real world, the terminology can become muddled. The latest attempt to combine the literary and philosophical notions of possible worlds and apply it to historiography came from Lubomír Doležel in his Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage (2010). I offer some criticism to his usage of possible worlds to separate history and fiction, and argue that when historiography is under discussion a more philosophical notion of possible worlds should be prioritized over the metaphorical interpretation of possible worlds.

Stochastic Modeling of Past Volcanic Crises

The statistical foundation of disaster risk analysis is past experience. From a scientific perspective, history is just one realization of what might have happened, given the randomness and chaotic dynamics of Nature. Stochastic analysis of the past is an exploratory exercise in counterfactual history, considering alternative possible scenarios. In particular, the dynamic perturbations that might have transitioned a volcano from an unrest to an eruptive state need to be considered. The stochastic modeling of past volcanic crises leads to estimates of eruption probability that can illuminate historical volcanic crisis decisions. It can also inform future economic risk management decisions in regions where there has been some volcanic unrest, but no actual eruption for at least hundreds of years. Furthermore, the availability of a library of past eruption probabilities would provide benchmark support for estimates of eruption probability in future volcanic crises.