Counterfactuals and futures histories: retrospective imagining as an auxiliary for the scenarios of expectance

'Unquestionable as history may seem, there are all the same quite different readings and disparate inferences despite the same series of facts. This goes to show that even professional historians can sometimes be overcome by meditations on past possibilities of bifurcations. As to 'alternatives to actual history', is serves well to bear in mind that few are plausible, but that belief in a predeter…