The two recent columns by Dr. Baytoram Ramharack have stirred quite a furor and, at least for me, in somewhat unexpected ways. Based on the online comments posted on these two columns, it appears that ...

In this New Republic review of an interesting new book by historian Richard Evans, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein provides a good explanation of why counterfactual analysis is often a useful tool ...

Napoleon spent a lot of his time in exile on St Helena thinking about how things would have turned out differently if he had won the battle of Waterloo. He fantasised about defeating his enemies and ...

Here are some things I think I am thinking about. 1) Tariff counterfactuals. The stock market has returned to where it was before the whole tariff fiasco happened. And now I am seeing people say “see, ...

Even though the public tends to regard academic history as boring and irrelevant, as a seemingly endless train of facts, dates and names, large numbers of people enjoy popular history. Large swaths of ...

History is never merely a record of what happened; it is also haunted by what might have happened otherwise. This is the realm of the counterfactual: thinking about history through "what if" scenarios ...

The debate that started with Dr. Ramharack’s article, “Rethinking Forbes Burnham”, (SN, Nov., 30th, 2021), has been quite instructive in many ways. There have been several enlightening responses in ...