Ferguson 1999

Ferguson, Niall, ed. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Introduction: Virtual History: Towards a 'chaotic' theory of the past, by Niall Ferguson, 1-90

counterfactual imagining often disparaged by historians; fiction writers pursue such alternative histories but are "irredeemably fictional" which "tends to diminish the plausibility of the historical setting" (7)

two kinds of counterfactuals used by historians: "those which are essentially the products of imagination but (generally) lack an empirical basis; and thsoe desigend to test hypotheses by (supposedly) empirical means, which eschew imagination in favor of computation" (18)