Editing Counterfactual history (section)

{{Short description|Study of historical events that never happened}}
{{Other uses|Counterfactual (disambiguation)}}
{{Distinguish|Pseudohistory|Alternate history|Historical fiction}}
[[File:1920 - before the storm.jpg|thumb|right|260px|A painting by [[Jakub Różalski]] depicts an alternate history of the 1920s, in which rural peasants must contend with giant mechanical walking tanks.]]
'''Counterfactual history''' (also '''virtual history''') is a form of [[historiography]] that attempts to answer the ''[[wikt:what if|What if?]]'' questions that arise from [[counterfactuals|counterfactual conditions]].<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Bunzl |first=Martin |author-link=Martin Bunzl |date=June 2004 |title=Counterfactual History: A User's Guide |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/530560 |journal=[[The American Historical Review]] |language=en |volume=109 |issue=3 |pages=845–858 |doi=10.1086/530560 |jstor=10.1086/530560 |issn=0002-8762|url-access=subscription }}</ref> Counterfactual history seeks by "conjecturing on what did not happen, or what might have happened, in order to understand what did happen."<ref name="Black Macraild">{{Cite book |last1=Black |first1=Jeremy |url=https://archive.org/details/studyinghistory0000blac_v8g5 |title=Studying History |last2=MacRaild |first2=Donald M. |publisher=[[Palgrave Macmillan]] |year=2007 |isbn=9781403987341 |edition=3rd |page=125 |author-link=Jeremy Black (historian)}}</ref> It has produced a literary genre which is variously called [[alternate history]], speculative history, allohistory, and hypothetical history.<ref name="Arnold" /><ref name="ksingles">{{Cite journal |last=Singles |first=Kathleen |date=2011-06-01 |title='What If?' and Beyond: Counterfactual History in Literature |url=https://academic.oup.com/camqtly/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/camqtly/bfr007 |journal=[[The Cambridge Quarterly]] |language=en |volume=40 |issue=2 |pages=180–188 |doi=10.1093/camqtly/bfr007 |issn=0008-199X|url-access=subscription }}</ref>