Best Download [Niall Ferguson] ✓ Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. Edited by Niall Ferguson || [Manga Book] PDF ☆

By Niall Ferguson | Comments: ( 918 ) | Date: ( Dec 12, 2019 )

Fluent and entertaining The Times Ferguson constructs an entire scenario starting with Charles I s defeat of the Covenanters, running through three revolutions, the American, the French and the Russian that did not happen and climaxing with the collapse of the West, ruled by an Anglo American empire, in the face of a mighty transcontinental, tsarist Russian im Fluent and entertaining The Times Ferguson constructs an entire scenario starting with Charles I s defeat of the Covenanters, running through three revolutions, the American, the French and the Russian that did not happen and climaxing with the collapse of the West, ruled by an Anglo American empire, in the face of a mighty transcontinental, tsarist Russian imperium A welcome, optimistic assault on an intellectual heresy that has done much, much harm than good Brian Appleyard, Sunday Times Quite brilliant, inspiring for the layman and an enviable tour de force for the informed reader A wonderful book lucid, exciting and easy to read Claus von Bulow, Literary Review Sizzling essays hot from the academic griddle Piers Brendon, Mail on Sunday The implications of Virtual History deserve to be meditated by every historian a talented and imaginative team of historians who tackle with counterfactual verve a series of mostly twentieth century turning points Christopher Andrew, Daily Telegraph

  • Title: Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. Edited by Niall Ferguson
  • Author: Niall Ferguson
  • ISBN: 9780241952252
  • Page: 391
  • Format: Paperback

About Author:

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is a British Scottish historian who specialises in financial and economic history as well as the history of empire He is the Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School He was educated at the private Glasgow Academy in Scotland, and at Magdalen College, Oxford.He is best known outside academia for his revisionist views rehabilitating imperialism and colonialism within academia, his championing of counterfactual history is a subject of some considerable controversy In 2008, Allen Lane published his most recent book, The Ascent of Money A Financial History of the World which he also presented as a Channel 4 television series.

Comments Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. Edited by Niall Ferguson

  • Andy

    A re-read & an upgrade from a 2 to a 4 Star ratingA lot was spent on the introduction but i’ll admit to skipping that after around 20 pages as was too disjointed for me to follow & wanted to get right to the meat of it! Have to admit you would need to know about each era & the politics of the actual history when reading about the virtual theories otherwise its quite hard to follow & perhaps picture, as well as separate the fact from the fiction. England without Cromwell was a l [...]

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  • Simon

    I will write only about the 90 or so page introduction to this volume by the editor, Niall Ferguson, which I began by reading assiduously and ended by skimming quickly. Counterfactual history is history written mainly in counterfactuals – sentences of the form “if x had/had not been the case, then y would/would not have been the case.” (Obviously, most sentences in such a history might not actually be counterfactuals, but the main theses will be.) Of such historical endeavors, four questio [...]

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  • Anil Swarup

    Another remarkably well researched book by Niall Ferguson. Those that are fond of history and question purported historical facts will love this book. The author first lays down the ground rules and looks at probable events that did not happen but could have happened and would have changed the course of history. He, quite correctly, does not subscribe to the deterministic view of history. For him history had to do a lot with individuals and their actions. There are indeed some fascinating altern [...]

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  • S.

    Niall Ferguson at his best can be spell-binding, and his research and ability to tie together disparate facts to weave together his unique tapestry of analysis and historical account can be unsurpassed, but his output is uneven. I haven't even rated some of his lesser works as they were just that boring. Virtual History isn't terrible--and Ferguson is only part-writer, editing together other counter-factual historians to create plausible alternate histories--but he falls prey to the 'transport a [...]

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  • David Bisset

    An enjoyable presentation of some less fanciful counterfactuals. I read the essays on the scenarios which particularly interest me in the twentieth century: some made sobering reading. No all Ferguson's introduction was rather arid, but his concluding essay was a counterfactual tour de force!

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  • Bradplumer

    Historical counterfactuals are fun to ponder: What if John Wilkes Booth had had poor aim? What if Hitler hadn't declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor? What if Napoleon had escaped to South America in a tiny submarine after Waterloo? Niall Ferguson wants to go even further. Alternative histories aren't just amusing, he argues in the introduction to this collection of essays. They're actually a useful way to study history. They can help us think through whether certain historical ev [...]

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  • Alastair Hudson

    This took a long time to read. The introduction does more than sets the scene; it's an entire essay on various different approaches to history and the philosophical implications of these different approaches. It is also a justification for the essays in the book to break free of the deterministic nature of most historical writing and analysis It's enlightening (for someone who's never studied history 'academically') but astoundingly dull.Neil does his best to establish a space for the worthy aca [...]

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  • Greg

    The historian Niall Ferguson has edited this collection of "possible, alternative" histories that cover a number of recent events, including the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, JFK's assassination, and choices the Soviet Union faced in the late 1990s.The writing quality varies from essay to essay and, frankly, some of those I found to be relatively "dense."Dr. Ferguson, by the way, also writes the longest bloomin' "introduction" -- almost 100 pages -- that I have ever encountered, alt [...]

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  • Steve

    Virtual History is a pseudo-academic work that explores "counterfactual" questions. It answers questions such as "What if J.F.K. had not been assasinated?" Which is of interest in a semi-modern setting. It also answers questions like "What if Charles I had not sued for peace with the Scots in the 1640s. The questions are actually quite interesting, but they are "Anglo-American" centric (the book's own term).There are several annoying things about this book, but happily only one of them permeates [...]

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  • JohnBellamy

    It's understandable that counterfactual historical speculations have been more popular with fiction writers than historians, as their handling by the latter has all too often lurched toward the simplistic and absurd. Indeed, too many of them--Robert Fogel's tome on what 19th century American development would have been like without railroads--have reminded me of nothing so much as an early "Saturday Night Live" skit which featured a "film" of the Battle of Hastings showing William the Conquerer' [...]

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  • Bookaholic

    Este o tentaţie umană firească să ne întrebăm ce s-ar fi întâmplat dacă un anume eveniment n-ar fi avut loc sau dacă am fi ales alt drum atunci când am fost puşi în faţa unei dileme. Nu este o pornire aplicabilă doar pe plan personal, ci şi extrapolată la un context mai larg, istoric. Aşa-numita istorie contrafactuală, care mizează pe „condiţionalul contrafactual”, dă frâu liber imaginaţiei pentru a dezvolta direcţii pe care trecutul le-a curmat de cele mai multe ori [...]

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  • Bas Kreuger

    Counterfactual history: horror for one historian, blessing for the other. Ferguson (as editor) and others prove to me that careful analysis of facts and figures plus the changing of one or a few variables can make a very believable alternative history. The UK staying out of WWI and thus Imperial Germany creating a sort of European Union 35 years early; Gorbatchev choosing the Chinese path instead of Perestroika and Glasnost and thus cracking down hard on unrest in the Eastern block in 1989 while [...]

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  • Mark Singer

    This is one the more interesting books I have read on counterfactuals, or alternative history, as they are better known. Edited by Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, the collection is focused on British and European history, and features a number of historians fleshing out their what-ifs. Three of the books nine essays are on World War II, which seems to be the main focus of alternate history these days. But the book also explores paths not often encountered, such as an English Civil War or Amer [...]

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  • Kym Robinson

    If you enjoy reading alternative history fiction then this book is for you. A nice collection of various periods in time and how things and events could even changed if key moments had of gone in another direction.A nice deviation and indulgence for any one with a sense of historical appreciation and understanding. Whether you agree or disagree it does not matter as it is all a dance down the path of 'imagine if' and therein lies the creative license of those writing, however 'expert' or not tha [...]

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  • Olethros

    -Imaginativo pero basándose en cosas con diferente grado de probabilidad o incluso de sensatez.- Género. Ensayo.Lo que nos cuenta. Con prólogo de Thomas Carlyle y epílogo de Niall Fergusson (que coordina y también colabora con uno de los trabajos), seis ensayos que proponen diferentes devenires hipotéticos de nuestra historia, desde una España sin enfrentamiento fratricida hasta la inexistencia de una Perestroika, pasando por diferentes escenarios ficticios en el desarrollo de la Segunda [...]

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  • Jack

    Finally finished this book. This book is made up of a series of essays by different authors dealing with 'counterfactual' historywhat could have happened. I am a fan of alternate histories and looked forward to reading this one - the dust jacket has a painting of London's Big Ben draped in Nazi banners.It read,for the most part, like a college history text book. The authors quoted chapter and verse from real primary source materials. Many of the essays were boring - and I love history.The one es [...]

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  • Harpal

    Not a huge fan of this book, but it's an interesting project for academic historians, and worth looking at just for that reason. Ferguson starts with making the argument for why counterfactual history is actually important for understanding history and, more importantly, the philosophy of history - for instance, not accepting historical events as inevitable and looking for deterministic processes behind them. It also allows one to grasp the importance of various decisions and the alternatives th [...]

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  • Carlos Dourado

    Há livros que parecem ser feitos para nos sentir ignorantes e dizer "Caro leitor: você acabou de ultrapassar o seu limite cultural; por favor volte para trás e devolva o livro se puder". Este foi o primeiro livro que li que me deixou com essa sensação.Comprei-o, pensando que iria ler algo sobre temas simples como "E se [inserir desfecho histórico diferente do que aconteceu]", e fui surpreendo por uma análise que mais parece adequada para uma tese de doutoramento: complexo, e com uma neces [...]

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  • Arjun Narayan

    This one is just straight up awful. By this book Niall Ferguson's descent into ridiculousness is complete (although it is only edited by him). It's extremely arrogant and far reaching in its attempt. I will be honest in saying that that is what attracted me to picking this book up from the shelves. However it spectacularly fails to deliver on its premise in ways far too hilarious for me to document here - see for some good takes. Pankaj Mishra's LRB review of "Civilization" also comes to mind.

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  • Julian

    I have little time for alternative history. I enjoyed a book at school ("If It Had Happened Otherwise") but really it is in general no more than amusement, light amusement, of little academic value. But I have to say I found this book very enlightening, indeed a serious work of history: by analysing in a serious way how events took their course in an unreal reality the authors shed much light on why they did take the course they did in real reality. The chapter on the Stuarts and the Civil War s [...]

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  • Phil

    This is an interesting idea with a great introduction as to why counterfactuals are worth considering. The method, in which primary source documents are used as the basis of drawing counterfactuals (No "How would Lincoln have reacted to an alien invasion in 1862?" kinds of questions) illustrates how history did not have to happen as it did. Ferguson's final essay, in which he combines all the counterfactuals into a single compelling narrative, is very entertaining. To borrow to Woody Allen, the [...]

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  • Tim

    I love Ferguson and how he focuses on the fact that history was not pre-ordained and that many possible solutions were possible at the time. In this book he outlines a plausible "virtual history" in an enjoyable way. I thought this was a little dense in places, and expected a lot of historical knowledge of the reader, but as a Ferguson fan I liked it a lot.

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  • Sam

    History seems full of things that had to have happened. But before historical events happened they didn't seem inevitable. Historians describing how things could've happened else-wise remind the reader of how historical events felt to the participants. It also gives us fresh eyes with which to appreciate our weird, unexpected, historical period.

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  • Chris Bull

    Tried to get through this book, but most of it read like an academic paper. Ugghh.This is not alternative history of which I am found of. This was heavy going. I wonder what if I hadn't spent any time on reading this.

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  • Chris Passingham

    I am afraid this book was written with the premise that every one in the world is obsessed with U.S. and not world, history. This made what should have been an interesting book into one that was slightly dull.

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  • Hom Sack

    Reading these essays have been a long slog. There is just more information in them that I needed or wanted to know, even with the periods of history that I'm familiar with, e.g. WW-I and WW-II. Nevertheless, the counterfactuals offered are interesting and worth considering.

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  • Rob Shurmer

    Worth the price for Ferguson's 90 page-survey of historiography that serves as an introduction.

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  • Carl Barnes

    Stunning counterfactual ending of what the world could be like today if things had gone differently!!

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  • Mike F

    Advocates use of of counterfactuals in historical scholarship. Wants to advocate for a "Chaostory".

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  • Steven Williams

    I don't think it's as good a collection of alternative histories as Cowley's What If? books. However, Ferguson does provide a good defense of the value of doing such histories.

    Reply
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  • Best Download [Niall Ferguson] ✓ Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. Edited by Niall Ferguson || [Manga Book] PDF ☆
    391 Niall Ferguson
  • thumbnail Title: Best Download [Niall Ferguson] ✓ Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. Edited by Niall Ferguson || [Manga Book] PDF ☆
    Posted by:Niall Ferguson
    Published :2019-09-19T11:55:58+00:00