Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern day historians, both amateur and professional. We speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. These narratives are often written off as politically inspired fantasy or as pop culture fodder, but in Telling It Like It Wasn’t, Catherine Gallagher takes the history of counterfactual history seriously, pinning it down as an object of dispassionate study. She doesn’t take a moral or normative stand on the practice, but focuses her attention on how it works and to what ends—a quest that takes readers on a fascinating tour of literary and historical criticism.
But in this history of our insignificance, one monumental discovery remains largely unknown: the geological realization that we dwell on an ancient planet. Not only are we unexceptional, but we are also remarkably new, like the fossils buried beneath our feet.
Catherine Gallagher is the Emerita Eggers Professor of English Literature at UC Berkeley.