Stereotype threat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat

Stereotype threat is a situational predicament in which people are or feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to stereotypes about their social group. It is purportedly a contributing factor to long-standing racial and gender gaps in academic performance. Since its introduction into the academic literature, stereotype threat has become one of the most widely studied topics in the field of social psychology.

Situational factors that increase stereotype threat can include the difficulty of the task, the belief that the task measures their abilities, and the relevance of the stereotype to the task. Individuals show higher degrees of stereotype threat on tasks they wish to perform well on and when they identify strongly with the stereotyped group. These effects are also increased when they expect discrimination due to their identification with a negatively stereotyped group. Repeated experiences of stereotype threat can lead to a vicious circle of diminished confidence, poor performance, and loss of interest in the relevant area of achievement. Stereotype threat has been argued to show a reduction in the performance of individuals who belong to negatively stereotyped groups. Its role in affecting public health disparities has also been suggested.

According to the theory, if negative stereotypes are present regarding a specific group, group members are likely to become anxious about their performance, which may hinder their ability to perform to their full potential. Importantly, the individual does not need to subscribe to the stereotype for it to be activated. It is hypothesized that the mechanism through which anxiety (induced by the activation of the stereotype) decreases performance is by depleting working memory (especially the phonological aspects of the working memory system). The opposite of stereotype threat is stereotype boost, which is when people perform better than they otherwise would have, because of exposure to positive stereotypes about their social group. A variant of stereotype boost is stereotype lift, which is people achieving better performance because of exposure to negative stereotypes about other social groups.

Some researchers have suggested that stereotype threat should not be interpreted as a factor in real-life performance gaps, and have raised the possibility of publication bias. Other critics have focused on correcting what they claim are misconceptions of early studies showing a large effect. However, meta-analyses and systematic reviews have shown significant evidence for the effects of stereotype threat, though the phenomenon defies over-simplistic characterization.

Empirical studies

More than 300 studies have been published showing the effects of stereotype threat on performance in a variety of domains. Stereotype threat is considered by some researchers to be a contributing factor to long-standing racial and gender achievement gaps, such as under-performance of black students relative to white ones in various academic subjects, and under-representation of women at higher echelons in the field of mathematics.

The strength of the stereotype threat that occurs depends on how the task is framed. If a task is framed to be neutral, stereotype threat is not likely to occur; however, if tasks are framed in terms of active stereotypes, participants are likely to perform worse on the task. For example, a study on chess players revealed that female players performed more poorly than expected when they were told they would be playing against a male opponent. In contrast, women who were told that their opponent was female performed as would be predicted by past ratings of performance. Female participants who were made aware of the stereotype of females performing worse at chess than males performed worse in their chess games.

A 2007 study extended stereotype threat research to entrepreneurship, a traditionally male-stereotyped profession. The study revealed that stereotype threat can depress women's entrepreneurial intentions while boosting men's intentions. However, when entrepreneurship is presented as a gender-neutral profession, men and women express a similar level of interest in becoming entrepreneurs. Another experiment involved a golf game which was described as a test of "natural athletic ability" or of "sports intelligence". When it was described as a test of athletic ability, European-American students performed worse, but when the description mentioned intelligence, African-American students performed worse.

The effect of stereotype threat (ST) on math test scores for girls and boys. Data from Osborne (2007).

Other studies have demonstrated how stereotype threat can negatively affect the performance of European Americans in athletic situations as well as the performance of men who are being tested on their social sensitivity. Although the framing of a task can produce stereotype threat in most individuals, certain individuals appear to be more likely to experience stereotype threat than others. Individuals who highly identify with a particular group appear to be more vulnerable to experiencing stereotype threat than individuals who do not identify strongly with the stereotyped group.

The mere presence of other people can evoke stereotype threat. In one experiment, women who took a mathematics exam along with two other women got 70% of the answers right, whereas women who took the same exam in the presence of two men got an average score of 55%.

The goal of a study conducted by Desert, Preaux, and Jund in 2009 was to see if children from lower socioeconomic groups are affected by stereotype threat. The study compared children that were 6–7 years old with children that were 8–9 years old from multiple elementary schools. These children were presented with the Raven's Matrices test, which is an intellectual ability test. Separate groups of children were given directions in an evaluative way and other groups were given directions in a non-evaluative way. The "evaluative" group received instructions that are usually given with the Raven Matrices test, while the "non-evaluative" group was given directions which made it seem as if the children were simply playing a game. The results showed that third graders performed better on the test than the first graders did, which was expected. However, the lower socioeconomic status children did worse on the test when they received directions in an evaluative way than the higher socioeconomic status children did when they received directions in an evaluative way. These results suggested that the framing of the directions given to the children may have a greater effect on performance than socioeconomic status. This was shown by the differences in performance based on which type of instructions they received. This information can be useful in classroom settings to help improve the performance of students of lower socioeconomic status.

There have been studies on the effects of stereotype threat based on age. A study was done on 99 senior citizens ranging in age from 60–75 years. These seniors were given multiple tests on certain factors and categories such as memory and physical abilities, and were also asked to evaluate how physically fit they believe themselves to be. Additionally, they were asked to read articles that contained both positive and negative outlooks about seniors, and they watched someone reading the same articles. The goal of this study was to see if priming the participants before the tests would affect performance. The results showed that the control group performed better than those that were primed with either negative or positive words prior to the tests. The control group seemed to feel more confident in their abilities than the other two groups.

Many psychological experiments carried out on Stereotype Threat focus on the physiological effects of negative stereotype threat on performance, looking at both high and low status groups. Scheepers and Ellemers tested the following hypothesis: when assessing a performance situation on the basis of current beliefs the low status group members would show a physiological threat response, and high-status members would also show a physiological threat response when examining a possible alteration of the status quo (Scheepers & Ellemers, 2005). The results of this experiment were in line with expectations. As predicted, participants in the low status condition showed higher blood pressure immediately after the status feedback, while participants in the high-status condition showed a spike in blood pressure while anticipating the second round of the task.

In 2012, Scheepers et al. hypothesized that when high social power is stimulated 'an efficient cardiovascular pattern (challenge)' is produced, whereas, 'an inefficient cardiovascular pattern' or threat is caused by the activation of low social power (Scheepers, de Wit, Ellemers & Sassenberg, 2012). Two experiments were carried out in order to test this hypothesis. The first experiment looked at power priming and the second experiment related to role play. Both results from these two experiments provided evidence in support for the hypothesis.

Cleopatra Abdou and Adam Fingerhut were the first to develop experimental methods to study stereotype threat in a health care context, including the first study indicating that health care stereotype threat is linked with adverse health outcomes and disparities.

Some studies have found null results. The single largest experimental test of stereotype threat (N = 2064), conducted on Dutch high school students, found no effect. The authors state, however, that these results are limited to a narrow age-range, experimental procedure and cultural context, and call for further registered reports and replication studies on the topic. Despite these limitations, they state in conclusion that their study shows "that the effects of stereotype threat on math test performance should not be overgeneralized."

Numerous meta-analyses and systematic reviews have shown significant evidence for the effects of stereotype threat. However they also point to ways in which the phenomenon defies over-simplistic characterization. For instance, one meta-analysis found that with female subjects "subtle threat-activating cues produced the largest effect, followed by blatant and moderately explicit cues" while with minorities "moderately explicit stereotype threat-activating cues produced the largest effect, followed by blatant and subtle cues".

Mechanisms

Although numerous studies demonstrate the effects of stereotype threat on performance, questions remain as to the specific cognitive factors that underlie these effects. Steele and Aronson originally speculated that attempts to suppress stereotype-related thoughts lead to anxiety and the narrowing of attention. This could contribute to the observed deficits in performance. In 2008, Toni Schmader, Michael Johns, and Chad Forbes published an integrated model of stereotype threat that focused on three interrelated factors:

1. stress arousal;
2. performance monitoring, which narrows attention; and,
3. efforts to suppress negative thoughts and emotions.

Schmader et al. suggest that these three factors summarize the pattern of evidence that has been accumulated by past experiments on stereotype threat. For example, stereotype threat has been shown to disrupt working memory and executive function, increase arousal, increase self-consciousness about one's performance, and cause individuals to try to suppress negative thoughts as well as negative emotions such as anxiety. People have a limited amount of cognitive resources available. When a large portion of these resources are spent focusing on anxiety and performance pressure, the individual is likely to perform worse on the task at hand.

A number of studies looking at physiological and neurological responses support Schmader and colleagues' integrated model of the processes that produce stereotype threat. Supporting an explanation in terms of stress arousal, one study found that African Americans under stereotype threat exhibit larger increases in arterial blood pressure. One study found increased cardiovascular activation amongst women who watched a video in which men outnumbered women at a math and science conference. Other studies have similarly found that individuals under stereotype threat display increased heart rates. Stereotype threat may also activate a neuroendocrine stress response, as measured by increased levels of cortisol while under threat. The physiological reactions that are induced by stereotype threat can often be subconscious, and can distract and interrupt cognitive focus from the task.

With regard to performance monitoring and vigilance, studies of brain activity have supported the idea that stereotype threat increases both of these processes. Forbes and colleagues recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) signals that measure electrical activity along the scalp, and found that individuals experiencing stereotype threat were more vigilant for performance-related stimuli.

Researchers found that women experiencing stereotype threat while taking a math test showed heightened activation in the ventral stream of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).

Another study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate brain activity associated with stereotype threat. The researchers found that women experiencing stereotype threat while taking a math test showed heightened activation in the ventral stream of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a neural region thought to be associated with social and emotional processing. Wraga and colleagues found that women under stereotype threat showed increased activation in the ventral ACC and that the amount of this activation predicted performance decrements on the task. When individuals were made aware of performance-related stimuli, they were more likely to experience stereotype threat.

A study conducted by Boucher, Rydell, Loo, and Rydell has shown that stereotype threat not only affects performance, but can also affect the ability to learn new information. In the study, undergraduate men and women had a session of learning followed by an assessment of what they learned. Some participants were given information intended to induce stereotype threat, and some of these participants were later given "gender fair" information, which it was predicted would reduce or remove stereotype threat. As a result, participants were split into four separate conditions: control group, stereotype threat only, stereotype threat removed before learning, and stereotype threat removed after learning. The results of the study showed that the women who were presented with the "gender fair" information performed better on the math related test than the women who were not presented with this information. This study also showed that it was more beneficial to women for the "gender fair" information to be presented prior to learning rather than after learning. These results suggest that eliminating stereotype threat prior to taking mathematical tests can help women perform better, and that eliminating stereotype threat prior to mathematical learning can help women learn better.

Original study

"The Effects of Stereotype Threat on the Standardized Test Performance of College Students (adjusted for group differences on SAT)". From J. Aronson, C.M. Steele, M.F. Salinas, M.J. Lustina, Readings About the Social Animal, 8th edition, ed. E. Aronson

In 1995, Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson performed the first experiments demonstrating that stereotype threat can undermine intellectual performance. Steele and Aronson measured this through a word completion task.

They had African-American and European-American college students take a difficult verbal portion of the Graduate Record Examination test. As would be expected based on national averages, the African-American students did not perform as well on the test. Steele and Aronson split students into three groups: stereotype-threat (in which the test was described as being "diagnostic of intellectual ability"), non-stereotype threat (in which the test was described as "a laboratory problem-solving task that was nondiagnostic of ability"), and a third condition (in which the test was again described as nondiagnostic of ability, but participants were asked to view the difficult test as a challenge). All three groups received the same test.

Steele and Aronson concluded that changing the instructions on the test could reduce African-American students' concern about confirming a negative stereotype about their group. Supporting this conclusion, they found that African-American students who regarded the test as a measure of intelligence had more thoughts related to negative stereotypes of their group. Additionally, they found that African Americans who thought the test measured intelligence were more likely to complete word fragments using words associated with relevant negative stereotypes (e.g., completing "__mb" as "dumb" rather than as "numb").

Adjusted for previous SAT scores, subjects in the non-diagnostic-challenge condition performed significantly better than those in the non-diagnostic-only condition and those in the diagnostic condition. In the first experiment, the race-by-condition interaction was marginally significant. However, the second study reported in the same paper found a significant interaction effect of race and condition. This suggested that placement in the diagnostic condition significantly impacted African Americans compared with European Americans.

Stereotype lift and stereotype boost

Stereotype threat concerns how stereotype cues can harm performance. However, in certain situations, stereotype activation can also lead to performance enhancement through stereotype lift or stereotype boost. Stereotype lift increases performance when people are exposed to negative stereotypes about another group. This enhanced performance has been attributed to increases in self-efficacy and decreases in self-doubt as a result of negative outgroup stereotypes. Stereotype boost suggests that positive stereotypes may enhance performance. Stereotype boost occurs when a positive aspect of an individual's social identity is made salient in an identity-relevant domain. Although stereotype boost is similar to stereotype lift in enhancing performance, stereotype lift is the result of a negative outgroup stereotype, whereas stereotype boost occurs due to activation of a positive ingroup stereotype.

Consistent with the positive racial stereotype concerning their superior quantitative skills, Asian American women performed better on a math test when their Asian identity was primed compared to a control condition where no social identity was primed. Conversely, these participants did worse on the math test when instead their gender identity—which is associated with stereotypes of inferior quantitative skills—was made salient, which is consistent with stereotype threat. Two replications of this result have been attempted. In one case, the effect was only reproduced after excluding participants who were unaware of stereotypes about the mathematical abilities of Asians or women, while the other replication failed to reproduce the original results even considering several moderating variables.

Long-term and other consequences

Decreased performance is the most recognized consequence of stereotype threat. However, research has also shown that stereotype threat can cause individuals to blame themselves for perceived failures, self-handicap, discount the value and validity of performance tasks, distance themselves from negatively stereotyped groups, and disengage from situations that are perceived as threatening.

Studies examining stereotype threat in Black Americans have found that when subjects are aware of the stereotype of Black criminality, anxiety about encountering police increases. This, in turn, can lead to self-regulatory efforts, more anxiety, and other behaviors that are commonly perceived as suspicious to police officers. Because police officers tend to perceive Black people as threatening, their reactions to these anxiety-induced behaviors are commonly more harsh than reactions to White people with the same behavior, and influences whether or not they decide to shoot the person.

In the long run, the chronic experience of stereotype threat may lead individuals to disidentify with the stereotyped group. For example, a woman may stop seeing herself as "a math person" after experiencing a series of situations in which she experienced stereotype threat. This disidentification is thought to be a psychological coping strategy to maintain self-esteem in the face of failure. Repeated exposure to anxiety and nervousness can lead individuals to choose to distance themselves from the stereotyped group.

Although much of the research on stereotype threat has examined the effects of coping with negative stereotype on academic performance, recently there has been an emphasis on how coping with stereotype threat could "spillover" to dampen self-control and thereby affect a much broader category of behaviors, even in non-stereotyped domains. Research by Michael Inzlicht and colleagues suggest that, when women cope with negative stereotypes about their math ability, they perform worse on math tests, and that, well after completing the math test, women may continue to show deficits even in unrelated domains. For example, women might overeat, be more aggressive, make more risky decisions, and show less endurance during physical exercise.

The perceived discrimination associated with stereotype threat can also have negative long-term consequences on individuals' mental health. Perceived discrimination has been extensively investigated in terms of its effects on mental health, with a particular emphasis on depression. Cross-sectional studies involving diverse minority groups, including those relating to internalized racism, have found that individuals who experience more perceived discrimination are more likely to exhibit depressive symptoms. Additionally, perceived discrimination has also been found to predict depressive symptoms in children and adolescents. Other negative mental health outcomes associated with perceived discrimination include a reduced general well-being, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and rebellious behavior. A meta-analysis conducted by Pascoe and Smart Richman has shown that the strong link between perceived discrimination and negative mental health persists even after controlling for factors such as education, socioeconomic status, and employment.

Mitigation

Additional research seeks ways to boost the test scores and academic achievement of students in negatively stereotyped groups. Such studies suggest various ways in which the effects of stereotype threat may be mitigated. For example, there have been increasing concerns about the negative effects of stereotype threats on MCAT, SAT, LSAT scores, etc. One effort at mitigation of the negative consequences of stereotype threat involves rescaling standardized test scores to adjust for the adverse effects of stereotypes.

Perhaps most prominently, well replicated findings suggest that teaching students to re-evaluate stress and adopt an incremental theory of intelligence can be an effective way to mitigate the effects of stereotype threat. Two studies sought to measure the effects of persuading participants that intelligence is malleable and can be increased through effort. Both suggested that if people believe that they can improve their performance based on effort, they are more likely to believe that they can overcome negative stereotypes, and thus perform well. Another study found that having students reexamine their situation or anxiety can help their executive resources (attentional control, working memory, etc.), rather than allowing stress to deplete them, and thus improve test performance. Subsequent research has found that students who are taught an incremental view of intelligence do not attribute academic setbacks to their innate ability, but rather to a situational attribute such as a poor study strategy. As a result, students are more likely to implement alternative study strategies and seek help from others.

Research on the power of self-affirmation exercises has shown promising results as well. One such study found that a self-affirmation exercise (in the form of a brief in-class writing assignment about a value that is important to them) significantly improved the grades of African-American middle-school students, and reduced the racial achievement gap by 40%. The authors of this study suggest that the racial achievement gap could be at least partially ameliorated by brief and targeted social-psychological interventions. Another such intervention was attempted with UK medical students, who were given a written assignment and a clinical assessment. For the written assignment group, white students performed worse than minority students. For the clinical assessment, both groups improved their performance, though the gap between racial groups was maintained. Allowing participants to think about a positive value or attribute about themselves prior to completing the task seemed to make them less susceptible to stereotype threat. Self-affirmation has also been shown to mitigate the performance gap between female and male participants on mathematical and geometrical reasoning tests. Similarly, it has been shown that encouraging women to think about their multiple roles and identities by creating self-concept map can eliminate the gender gap on a relatively difficult standardized test. Women given such an opportunity for reflection did equally well as men on the math portion of the GRE, while women who did not create a self-concept map did significantly worse on the math section than men did.

Increasing the representation of minority groups in a field has also been shown to mitigate stereotype threat. In one study, women in STEM fields were shown a video of a conference with either a balanced or unbalanced ratio of men to women. The women viewing an unbalanced ratio reported a lower sense of belonging and less desire to participate. Decreasing cues that reflect only a majority group and increasing cues of minority groups can create environments that mitigate against stereotype threat. Further research has focused on constructing environments such that the physical objects in the environment do not reflect one majority group. For instance, in one study, researchers argued that individuals make decisions about group membership based on the group's environment and showed that altering the physical objects in a room boosted minority participation. In this study, removing stereotypical computer science objects and replacing them with non-stereotypical objects increased female participation in computer science to an equal level as male peers.

Directly communicating that diversity is valued may also be effective. One study revealed that a company's pamphlet stating a direct value of diversity, compared to a color blind approach, caused African Americans to report an increase in trust and comfort towards the company. Promoting cross-group relations between people of varying backgrounds has also been shown to be effective at promoting a sense of belonging among minority group members. For instance, a 2008 study indicates that students have a lower sense of belonging at institutions where they are the minority, but developing friendships with members of other racial groups increased their sense of belonging. In 2007, a study by Greg Walton and Geoffrey Cohen showed results in boosting the grades of African-American college students, and eliminating the racial achievement gap between them and their white peers over the first year of college, by emphasizing to participants that concerns about social belonging tend to lessen over time. These findings suggest that allowing individuals to feel as though they are welcomed into a desirable group makes them more likely to ignore stereotypes. The upshot is that if minority college students are welcomed into the world of academia, they are less likely to be influenced by the negative stereotypes of poor minority performance on academic tasks.

One early study suggested that simply informing college women about stereotype threat and its effects on performance was sufficient to eliminate the predicted gender gap on a difficult math test. The authors of this study argued that making people aware of the fact that they will not necessarily perform worse despite the existence of a stereotype can boost their performance. However, other research has found that merely providing information is not enough, and can even have the opposite effect. In one study, women were given a text "summarizing an experiment in which stereotypes, and not biological differences, were shown to be the cause of women's underperformance in math", and then they performed a math exercise. It was found that "women who properly understood the meaning of the information provided, and thus became knowledgeable about stereotype threat, performed significantly worse at a calculus task". In such cases, further research suggests that the manner in which the information is presented –– that is, whether subjects are made to perceive themselves as targets of negative stereotyping –– may be decisive.

Criticism

Some researchers have argued that stereotype threat should not be interpreted as a factor in real-world achievement gaps. Reviews have raised concerns that the effect might have been over-estimated in the performance of schoolgirls and argued that the field likely suffers from publication bias.

According to Paul R. Sackett, Chaitra M. Hardison, and Michael J. Cullen, both the media and scholarly literature have wrongly concluded that eliminating stereotype threat could completely eliminate differences in test performance between European Americans and African Americans. Sackett et al. argued that, in Steele and Aronson's (1995) experiments where stereotype threat was mitigated, an achievement gap of approximately one standard deviation remained between the groups, which is very close in size to that routinely reported between African American and European Americans' average scores on large-scale standardized tests such as the SAT. In subsequent correspondence between Sackett et al. and Steele and Aronson, Sackett et al. wrote that "They [Steele and Aronson] agree that it is a misinterpretation of the Steele and Aronson (1995) results to conclude that eliminating stereotype threat eliminates the African American-White test-score gap." However, in that same correspondence, Steele and Aronson point out that "it is the stereotype threat conditions, and not the no-threat conditions, that produce group differences most like those of real-life testing."

In a 2009 meta-analysis, Gregory M. Walton and Steven J. Spencer argued that studies of stereotype threat may in fact systematically under-represent its effects, since such studies measure "only that portion of psychological threat that research has identified and remedied. To the extent that unidentified or unremedied psychological threats further undermine performance, the results underestimate the bias." Despite these limitations, they found that efforts to mitigate stereotype threat significantly reduced group differences on high-stakes tests.

In 1998, Arthur R. Jensen criticized stereotype threat theory on the basis that it invokes an additional mechanism to explain effects which could be, according to him, explained by other, at the time better known and more established theories, such as test anxiety and especially the Yerkes–Dodson law. In Jensen's view, the effects which are attributed to stereotype threat may simply reflect "the interaction of ability level with test anxiety as a function of test complexity". However, a subsequent study by Johannes Keller specifically controlled for Jensen's hypothesis and still found significant stereotype threat effects.

Gijsbert Stoet and David C. Geary reviewed the evidence for the stereotype threat explanation of the achievement gap in mathematics between men and women. They concluded that the relevant stereotype threat research has many methodological problems, such as not having a control group, and that some literature on this topic misrepresents stereotype threat as more well established than it is. Still, they did find evidence for a marginally significant (d=0.17) effect of stereotype-threat.

In an article published on Psychology Today in 2015, psychologist Lee Jussim pointed out that, in their original 1995 study, Steele and Aronson controlled for prior SAT scores using analysis of covariance, which caused the difference between black and white students' test scores in the "non-diagnostic" test group to nearly disappear. Jussim argued that, using the same technique to control for prior temperatures, he could cause Nome, Alaska and Tampa, Florida to appear to have nearly the same average temperature. However, as Steele and Aronson point out, the larger literature beyond their 1995 paper "shows the effect of stereotype threat on an array of tests –– SATs, IQ tests, and French language tests to list only a few –– sometimes with a co-variance adjustment, but many times without."

Publication bias

A meta-analysis by Flore and Wicherts (2015) concluded that the average reported effect of stereotype threat is small, but also that the field may be inflated by publication bias. They argued that, correcting for this, the most likely true effect size is near zero.

Some researchers finding null results have raised similar concerns. For instance, Ganley et al. (2013) examined stereotype threat in a well-powered (total N ~ 1000) multi-experiment study and concluded that "no evidence that the mathematics performance of school-age girls was impacted by stereotype threat" was found. Positing that large, well-controlled studies have tended to find smaller or non-significant effects, the authors argued that evidence for stereotype threat in children may reflect publication bias. They also suggested that, among the many underpowered studies run, researchers may have selectively published those in which false-positive effects reached significance.

However, a more recent meta-analysis by Liu et al. (2020) challenges conclusions such as those of Flore and Wicherts, arguing that while publication bias may inflate the effectiveness of stereotype threat interventions, the level of bias found is insufficient to overturn consensus that such interventions are associated with performance benefits. The authors broke down the studies they analyzed into three types –– belief-based, identity-based, and resilience-based –– finding greater evidence for publication bias in the last of these and more robust evidence for the effectiveness of intervention in the first two types.

Alternate history

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_history 

Alternate history

Alternate history, alternative history (in British English and Commonwealth English), or simply althist, sometimes abbreviated as AH, is a genre of speculative fiction consisting of stories in which one or more historical events occur differently. These stories usually contain "what if" scenarios at crucial points in history and present outcomes other than those in the historical record. The stories are conjectural but are sometimes based on fact. Alternate history has been seen as a subgenre of literary fiction, science fiction, or historical fiction; alternate history works may use tropes from any or all of these genres. Another term occasionally used for the genre is "allohistory" (literally "other history").

Since the 1950s, this type of fiction has, to a large extent, merged with science fiction tropes involving time travel between alternate histories, psychic awareness of the existence of one universe by the people in another, or time travel that results in history splitting into two or more timelines. Cross-time, time-splitting, and alternate history themes have become so closely interwoven that it is impossible to discuss them fully apart from one another.

In Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and Galician, the genre of alternate history is called uchronie / ucronia / ucronía / Uchronie, which has given rise to the term Uchronia in English. This neologism is based on the prefix ου- (which in Ancient Greek means "not/not any/no") and the Greek χρόνος (chronos), meaning "time". A uchronia means literally "(in) no time," by analogy to utopia, etymologically "(in) no place." This term apparently also inspired the name of the alternate history book list, uchronia.net.

Definition

The Collins English Dictionary defines alternative history as "a genre of fiction in which the author speculates on how the course of history might have been altered if a particular historical event had had a different outcome." According to Steven H Silver, an American science fiction editor, alternate history requires three things: a point of divergence from the history of our world prior to the time at which the author is writing, a change that would alter history as it is known, and an examination of the ramifications of that change.

Several genres of fiction have been misidentified as alternate history. Science fiction set in what was the future but is now the past, like Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), is not alternate history because the author did not make the choice to change the past at the time of writing. Secret history, which can take the form of fiction or nonfiction, documents events that may or may not have happened historically but did not have an effect on the overall outcome of history, and so is not to be confused with alternate history. A different definition of "secret history" by the same writer is also searchable.

Alternate history is related to, but distinct from, counterfactual history. This term is used by some professional historians to describe the practice of using thoroughly researched and carefully reasoned speculations on "what might have happened if..." as a tool of academic historical research, as opposed to a literary device.

History of literature

Antiquity and medieval

Title page of the first Castilian-language translation of Joanot Martorell's Tirant lo Blanch

The earliest example of alternate (or counterfactual) history is found in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita Libri (book IX, sections 17–19). Livy contemplated an alternative 4th century BC in which Alexander the Great had survived to attack Europe as he had planned; asking, "What would have been the results for Rome if she had been engaged in a war with Alexander?" Livy concluded that the Romans would likely have defeated Alexander. An even earlier possibility is Herodotus's Histories, which contains speculative material.

Another example of counterfactual history was posited by cardinal and Doctor of the Church Peter Damian in the 11th century. In his famous work De Divina Omnipotentia, a long letter in which he discusses God's omnipotence, he treats questions related to the limits of divine power, including the question of whether God can change the past, for example, bringing about that Rome was never founded:

I see I must respond finally to what many people, on the basis of your holiness’s [own] judgment, raise as an objection on the topic of this dispute. For they say: If, as you assert, God is omnipotent in all things, can he manage this, that things that have been made were not made? He can certainly destroy all things that have been made, so that they do not exist now. But it cannot be seen how he can bring it about that things that have been made were not made. To be sure, it can come about that from now on and hereafter Rome does not exist; for it can be destroyed. But no opinion can grasp how it can come about that it was not founded long ago...

One early work of fiction detailing an alternate history is Joanot Martorell's 1490 epic romance Tirant lo Blanch, which was written when the loss of Constantinople to the Turks was still a recent and traumatic memory for Christian Europe. It tells the story of the knight Tirant the White from Brittany who travels to the embattled remnants of the Byzantine Empire. He becomes a Megaduke and commander of its armies and manages to fight off the invading Ottoman armies of Mehmet II. He saves the city from Islamic conquest, and even chases the Turks deeper into lands they had previously conquered.

19th century

One of the earliest works of alternate history published in large quantities for the reception of a large audience may be Louis Geoffroy's Histoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoléon et la conquête du monde (1812–1832) (History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoleon and the Conquest of the World) (1836), which imagines Napoleon's First French Empire emerging victorious in the French invasion of Russia in 1811 and in an invasion of England in 1814, later unifying the world under Bonaparte's rule.

In the English language, the first known complete alternate history is Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "P.'s Correspondence", published in 1845. It recounts the tale of a man who is considered "a madman" due to his perceptions of a different 1845, a reality in which long-dead famous people, such as the poets Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, the actor Edmund Kean, the British politician George Canning, and Napoleon Bonaparte, are still alive.

The first novel-length alternate history in English would seem to be Castello Holford's Aristopia (1895). While not as nationalistic as Louis Geoffroy's Napoléon et la conquête du monde, 1812–1823, Aristopia is another attempt to portray a Utopian society. In Aristopia, the earliest settlers in Virginia discover a reef made of solid gold and are able to build a Utopian society in North America.

Early 20th century and the era of the pulps

In 1905, H. G. Wells published A Modern Utopia. As explicitly noted in the book itself, Wells's main aim in writing it was to set out his social and political ideas, the plot serving mainly as a vehicle to expound them. This book introduced the idea of a person being transported from a point in our familiar world to the precise geographical equivalent point in an alternate world in which history had gone differently. The protagonists undergo various adventures in the alternate world, and then are finally transported back to our world, again to the precise geographical equivalent point. Since then, that has become a staple of the alternate history genre.

A number of alternate history stories and novels appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (see, for example, Joseph Edgar Chamberlin's The Ifs of History [1907] and Charles Petrie's If: A Jacobite Fantasy [1926]). In 1931, British historian Sir John Squire collected a series of essays from some of the leading historians of the period for his anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise. In that work, scholars from major universities, as well as important non-academic authors, turned their attention to such questions as "If the Moors in Spain Had Won" and "If Louis XVI Had Had an Atom of Firmness". The essays range from serious scholarly efforts to Hendrik Willem van Loon's fanciful and satiric portrayal of an independent 20th-century New Amsterdam, a Dutch city-state on the island of Manhattan. Among the authors included were Hilaire Belloc, André Maurois, and Winston Churchill.

A 1952 world map from the universe of Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee in which the Confederacy wins the "War of Southern Independence," the counterfactual American Civil War

One of the entries in Squire's volume was Churchill's "If Lee Had Not Won [sic] the Battle of Gettysburg", written from the viewpoint of a historian in a world in which the Confederacy had won the American Civil War. The entry considers what would have happened if the North had been victorious (in other words, a character from an alternate world imagines a world more like the real one we live in, although it is not identical in every detail). Speculative work that narrates from the point of view of an alternate history is variously known as "recursive alternate history", a "double-blind what-if", or an "alternate-alternate history". Churchill's essay was one of the influences behind Ward Moore's alternate history novel Bring the Jubilee in which General Robert E. Lee won the Battle of Gettysburg and paved the way for the eventual victory of the Confederacy in the American Civil War (named the "War of Southron Independence" in this timeline). The protagonist, the autodidact Hodgins Backmaker, travels back to the aforementioned battle and inadvertently changes history, which results in the emergence of our own timeline and the consequent victory of the Union instead.

The American humorist author James Thurber parodied alternate history stories about the American Civil War in his 1930 story "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox", which he accompanied with this very brief introduction: "Scribner's magazine is publishing a series of three articles: 'If Booth Had Missed Lincoln', 'If Lee Had Won the Battle of Gettysburg', and 'If Napoleon Had Escaped to America'. This is the fourth".

Another example of alternate history from this period (and arguably the first that explicitly posited cross-time travel from one universe to another as anything more than a visionary experience) is H.G. Wells' Men Like Gods (1923) in which the London-based journalist Mr. Barnstable, along with two cars and their passengers, is mysteriously teleported into "another world", which the "Earthlings" call Utopia. Being far more advanced than Earth, Utopia is some 3000 years ahead of humanity in its development. Wells describes a multiverse of alternative worlds, complete with the paratime travel machines that would later become popular with American pulp writers. However, since his hero experiences only a single alternate world, the story is not very different from conventional alternate history.

In the 1930s, alternate history moved into a new arena. The December 1933 issue of Astounding published Nat Schachner's "Ancestral Voices", which was quickly followed by Murray Leinster's "Sidewise in Time". While earlier alternate histories examined reasonably-straightforward divergences, Leinster attempted something completely different. In his "World gone mad", pieces of Earth traded places with their analogs from different timelines. The story follows Professor Minott and his students from a fictitious Robinson College as they wander through analogues of worlds that followed a different history.

The world in 1964 in the novel Fatherland in which the Nazis won World War II.

A somewhat similar approach was taken by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1941 novelette Elsewhen in which a professor trains his mind to move his body across timelines. He then hypnotizes his students so that they can explore more of them. Eventually, each settles into the reality that is most suitable for him or her. Some of the worlds they visit are mundane, some are very odd, and others follow science fiction or fantasy conventions.

World War II produced alternate history for propaganda: both British and American authors wrote works depicting Nazi invasions of their respective countries as cautionary tales.

Time travel to create historical divergences

The period around World War II also saw the publication of the time travel novel Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp in which an American academic travels to Italy at the time of the Byzantine invasion of the Ostrogoths. De Camp's time traveler, Martin Padway, is depicted as making permanent historical changes and implicitly forming a new time branch, thereby making the work an alternate history.

In William Tenn's short story Brooklyn Project (1948), a tyrannical US Government brushes aside the warnings of scientists about the dangers of time travel and goes on with a planned experiment - with the result that minor changes to the prehistoric past cause Humanity to never have existed, its place taken by tentacled underwater intelligent creatures - who also have a tyrannical government which also insists on experimenting with time-travel.

Time travel as the cause of a point of divergence (POD), which can denote either the bifurcation of a historical timeline or a simple replacement of the future that existed before the time-travelling event, has continued to be a popular theme. In Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, the protagonist lives in an alternate history in which the Confederacy has won the American Civil War. He travels backward through time and brings about a Union victory at the Battle of Gettysburg.

When a story's assumptions about the nature of time travel lead to the complete replacement of the visited time's future, rather than just the creation of an additional time line, the device of a "time patrol" is often used where guardians move through time to preserve the "correct" history.

A more recent example is Making History by Stephen Fry in which a time machine is used to alter history so that Adolf Hitler was never born. That ironically results in a more competent leader of the Third Reich and results in the country's ascendancy and longevity in the altered timeline.

Cross-time stories

H.G. Wells' "cross-time" or "many universes" variant (see above) was fully developed by Murray Leinster in his 1934 short story "Sidewise in Time", in which sections of the Earth's surface begin changing places with their counterparts in alternate timelines.

Fredric Brown employed this subgenre to satirize the science fiction pulps and their adolescent readers—and fears of foreign invasion—in the classic What Mad Universe (1949). In Clifford D. Simak's Ring Around the Sun (1953), the hero ends up in an alternate earth of thick forests in which humanity never developed but a band of mutants is establishing a colony; the story line appears to frame the author's anxieties regarding McCarthyism and the Cold War.

Quantum theory of many worlds

While many justifications for alternate histories involve a multiverse, the "many world" theory would naturally involve many worlds, in fact a continually exploding array of universes. In quantum theory, new worlds would proliferate with every quantum event, and even if the writer uses human decisions, every decision that could be made differently would result in a different timeline. A writer's fictional multiverse may, in fact, preclude some decisions as humanly impossible, as when, in Night Watch, Terry Pratchett depicts a character informing Vimes that while anything that can happen, has happened, nevertheless there is no history whatsoever in which Vimes has ever murdered his wife. When the writer explicitly maintains that all possible decisions are made in all possible ways, one possible conclusion is that the characters were neither brave, nor clever, nor skilled, but simply lucky enough to happen on the universe in which they did not choose the cowardly route, take the stupid action, fumble the crucial activity, etc.; few writers focus on this idea, although it has been explored in stories such as Larry Niven's story All the Myriad Ways, where the reality of all possible universes leads to an epidemic of suicide and crime because people conclude their choices have no moral import.

In any case, even if it is true that every possible outcome occurs in some world, it can still be argued that traits such as bravery and intelligence might still affect the relative frequency of worlds in which better or worse outcomes occurred (even if the total number of worlds with each type of outcome is infinite, it is still possible to assign a different measure to different infinite sets). The physicist David Deutsch, a strong advocate of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, has argued along these lines, saying that "By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen." This view is perhaps somewhat too abstract to be explored directly in science fiction stories, but a few writers have tried, such as Greg Egan in his short story The Infinite Assassin, where an agent is trying to contain reality-scrambling "whirlpools" that form around users of a certain drug, and the agent is constantly trying to maximize the consistency of behavior among his alternate selves, attempting to compensate for events and thoughts he experiences, he guesses are of low measure relative to those experienced by most of his other selves.

Many writers—perhaps the majority—avoid the discussion entirely. In one novel of this type, H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, a Pennsylvania State Police officer, who knows how to make gunpowder, is transported from our world to an alternate universe where the recipe for gunpowder is a tightly held secret and saves a country that is about to be conquered by its neighbors. The paratime patrol members are warned against going into the timelines immediately surrounding it, where the country will be overrun, but the book never depicts the slaughter of the innocent thus entailed, remaining solely in the timeline where the country is saved.

The cross-time theme was further developed in the 1960s by Keith Laumer in the first three volumes of his Imperium sequence, which would be completed in Zone Yellow (1990). Piper's politically more sophisticated variant was adopted and adapted by Michael Kurland and Jack Chalker in the 1980s; Chalker's G.O.D. Inc trilogy (1987–89), featuring paratime detectives Sam and Brandy Horowitz, marks the first attempt at merging the paratime thriller with the police procedural. Kurland's Perchance (1988), the first volume of the never-completed "Chronicles of Elsewhen", presents a multiverse of secretive cross-time societies that utilize a variety of means for cross-time travel, ranging from high-tech capsules to mutant powers. Harry Turtledove has launched the Crosstime Traffic series for teenagers featuring a variant of H. Beam Piper's paratime trading empire.

Rival paratime worlds

The concept of a cross-time version of a world war, involving rival paratime empires, was developed in Fritz Leiber's Change War series, starting with the Hugo Award winning The Big Time (1958); followed by Richard C. Meredith's Timeliner trilogy in the 1970s, Michael McCollum's A Greater Infinity (1982) and John Barnes' Timeline Wars trilogy in the 1990s.

Such "paratime" stories may include speculation that the laws of nature can vary from one universe to the next, providing a science fictional explanation—or veneer—for what is normally fantasy. Aaron Allston's Doc Sidhe and Sidhe Devil take place between our world, the "grim world" and an alternate "fair world" where the Sidhe retreated to. Although technology is clearly present in both worlds, and the "fair world" parallels our history, about fifty years out of step, there is functional magic in the fair world. Even with such explanation, the more explicitly the alternate world resembles a normal fantasy world, the more likely the story is to be labelled fantasy, as in Poul Anderson's "House Rule" and "Loser's Night". In both science fiction and fantasy, whether a given parallel universe is an alternate history may not be clear. The writer might allude to a POD only to explain the existence and make no use of the concept, or may present the universe without explanation of its existence.

Major writers explore alternate histories

Isaac Asimov's short story "What If—" (1952) is about a couple who can explore alternate realities by means of a television-like device. This idea can also be found in Asimov's novel The End of Eternity (1955), in which the "Eternals" can change the realities of the world, without people being aware of it. Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories feature conflicts between forces intent on changing history and the Patrol who work to preserve it. One story, Delenda Est, describes a world in which Carthage triumphed over the Roman Republic. The Big Time, by Fritz Leiber, describes a Change War ranging across all of history.

Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium is one of the earliest alternate history novels; it was published by Fantastic Stories of the Imagination in 1961, in magazine form, and reprinted by Ace Books in 1962 as one half of an Ace Double. Besides our world, Laumer describes a world ruled by an Imperial aristocracy formed by the merger of European empires, in which the American Revolution never happened, and a third world in post-war chaos ruled by the protagonist's doppelganger.

A map of the contiguous United States as depicted in The Man in the High Castle TV series, based on Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle

Philip K. Dick's novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962), is an alternate history in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won World War II. This book contains an example of "alternate-alternate" history, in that one of its characters authored a book depicting a reality in which the Allies won the war, itself divergent from real-world history in several aspects. The several characters live within a divided United States, in which the Empire of Japan takes the Pacific states, governing them as a puppet, Nazi Germany takes the East Coast of the United States and parts of the Midwest, with the remnants of the old United States' government as the Neutral Zone, a buffer state between the two superpowers. The book has inspired an Amazon series of the same name.

Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), is a story of incest that takes place within an alternate North America settled in part by Czarist Russia and that borrows from Dick's idea of "alternate-alternate" history (the world of Nabokov's hero is wracked by rumors of a "counter-earth" that apparently is ours). Some critics believe that the references to a counter-earth suggest that the world portrayed in Ada is a delusion in the mind of the hero (another favorite theme of Dick's novels). Strikingly, the characters in Ada seem to acknowledge their own world as the copy or negative version, calling it "Anti-Terra", while its mythical twin is the real "Terra". Like history, science has followed a divergent path on Anti-Terra: it boasts all the same technology as our world, but all based on water instead of electricity; e.g., when a character in Ada makes a long-distance call, all the toilets in the house flush at once to provide hydraulic power.

Guido Morselli described the defeat of Italy (and subsequently France) in World War I in his novel, Past Conditional (1975; Contro-passato prossimo), wherein the static Alpine front line which divided Italy from Austria during that war collapses when the Germans and the Austrians forsake trench warfare and adopt blitzkrieg twenty years in advance.

Kingsley Amis set his novel, The Alteration (1976), in the 20th century, but major events in the Reformation did not take place, and Protestantism is limited to the breakaway Republic of New England. Martin Luther was reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church and later became Pope Germanian I.

In Nick Hancock and Chris England's 1997 book What Didn't Happen Next: An Alternative History of Football it is suggested that, had Gordon Banks been fit to play in the 1970 FIFA World Cup quarter-final, there would have been no Thatcherism and the post-war consensus would have continued indefinitely.

Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), starts at the point of divergence with Timur turning his army away from Europe, and the Black Death has killed 99% of Europe's population, instead of only a third. Robinson explores world history from that point in AD 1405 (807 AH) to about AD 2045 (1467 AH). Rather than following the great man theory of history, focusing on leaders, wars, and major events, Robinson writes more about social history, similar to the Annales School of history theory and Marxist historiography, focusing on the lives of ordinary people living in their time and place.

Philip Roth's novel, The Plot Against America (2004), looks at an America where Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in 1940 in his bid for a third term as President of the United States, and Charles Lindbergh is elected, leading to a US that features increasing fascism and anti-Semitism.

Michael Chabon, occasionally an author of speculative fiction, contributed to the genre with his novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007), which explores a world in which the State of Israel was destroyed in its infancy and many of the world's Jews instead live in a small strip of Alaska set aside by the US government for Jewish settlement. The story follows a Jewish detective solving a murder case in the Yiddish-speaking semi-autonomous city state of Sitka. Stylistically, Chabon borrows heavily from the noir and detective fiction genres, while exploring social issues related to Jewish history and culture. Apart from the alternate history of the Jews and Israel, Chabon also plays with other common tropes of alternate history fiction; in the book, Germany actually loses the war even harder than they did in reality, getting hit with a nuclear bomb instead of just simply losing a ground war (subverting the common "what if Germany won WWII?" trope).

Contemporary alternate history in popular literature

The world of 1942, as depicted at the start of S. M. Stirling's The Domination series

 

World War I from Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory ("Timeline 191") series

The late 1980s and the 1990s saw a boom in popular-fiction versions of alternate history, fueled by the emergence of the prolific alternate history author Harry Turtledove, as well as the development of the steampunk genre and two series of anthologies—the What Might Have Been series edited by Gregory Benford and the Alternate ... series edited by Mike Resnick. This period also saw alternate history works by S. M. Stirling, Kim Stanley Robinson, Harry Harrison, Howard Waldrop, Peter Tieryas, and others.

In 1986, a sixteen-part epic comic book series called Captain Confederacy began examining a world where the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War. In the series, the Captain and others heroes are staged government propaganda events featuring the feats of these superheroes.

Since the late 1990s, Harry Turtledove has been the most prolific practitioner of alternate history and has been given the title "Master of Alternate History" by some. His books include those of Timeline 191 (a.k.a. Southern Victory, also known as TL-191), in which, while the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War, the Union and Imperial Germany defeat the Entente Powers in the two "Great War"s of the 1910s and 1940s (with a Nazi-esque Confederate government attempting to exterminate its Black population), and the Worldwar series, in which aliens invaded Earth during World War II. Other stories by Turtledove include A Different Flesh, in which America was not colonized from Asia during the last ice age; In the Presence of Mine Enemies, in which the Nazis won World War II; and Ruled Britannia, in which the Spanish Armada succeeded in conquering England in the Elizabethan era, with William Shakespeare being given the task of writing the play that will motivate the Britons to rise up against their Spanish conquerors. He also co-authored a book with actor Richard Dreyfuss, The Two Georges, in which the United Kingdom retained the American colonies, with George Washington and King George III making peace. He did a two-volume series in which the Japanese not only bombed Pearl Harbor but also invaded and occupied the Hawaiian Islands.

Perhaps the most incessantly explored theme in popular alternate history focuses on worlds in which the Nazis won World War Two. In some versions, the Nazis and/or Axis Powers conquer the entire world; in others, they conquer most of the world but a "Fortress America" exists under siege; while in others, there is a Nazi/Japanese Cold War comparable to the US/Soviet equivalent in 'our' timeline. Fatherland (1992), by Robert Harris, is set in Europe following the Nazi victory. The novel Dominion by C.J. Sansom (2012) is similar in concept but is set in England, with Churchill the leader of an anti-German Resistance and other historic persons in various fictional roles. In the Mecha Samurai Empire series (2016), Peter Tieryas focuses on the Asian-American side of the alternate history, exploring an America ruled by the Japanese Empire while integrating elements of Asian pop culture like mechas and videogames.

Several writers have posited points of departure for such a world but then have injected time splitters from the future or paratime travel, for instance James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation. Norman Spinrad wrote The Iron Dream in 1972, which is intended to be a science fiction novel written by Adolf Hitler after fleeing from Europe to North America in the 1920s.

In Jo Walton's "Small Change" series, the United Kingdom made peace with Hitler before the involvement of the United States in World War II, and slowly collapses due to severe economic depression. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen have written a novel, 1945, in which the US defeated Japan but not Germany in World War II, resulting in a Cold War with Germany rather than the Soviet Union. Gingrich and Forstchen neglected to write the promised sequel; instead, they wrote a trilogy about the American Civil War, starting with Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War, in which the Confederates win a victory at the Battle of Gettysburg - however, after Lincoln responds by bringing Grant and his forces to the eastern theater, the Army of Northern Virginia is soon trapped and destroyed in Maryland, and the war ends within weeks. Also from that general era, Martin Cruz Smith, in his first novel, posited an independent American Indian nation following the defeat of Custer in The Indians Won (1970).

Beginning with The Probability Broach in 1980, L. Neil Smith wrote several novels that postulated the disintegration of the US Federal Government after Albert Gallatin joins the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 and eventually leads to the creation of a libertarian utopia.

A recent time traveling splitter variant involves entire communities being shifted elsewhere to become the unwitting creators of new time branches. These communities are transported from the present (or the near-future) to the past or to another time-line via a natural disaster, the action of technologically advanced aliens, or a human experiment gone wrong. S. M. Stirling wrote the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy, in which Nantucket Island and all its modern inhabitants are transported to Bronze Age times to become the world's first superpower. In Eric Flint's 1632 series, a small town in West Virginia is transported to 17th century central Europe and drastically changes the course of the Thirty Years' War, which was then underway. John Birmingham's Axis of Time trilogy deals with the culture shock when a United Nations naval task force from 2021 finds itself back in 1942 helping the Allies against the Empire of Japan and the Germans (and doing almost as much harm as good in spite of its advanced weapons). Similarly, Robert Charles Wilson's Mysterium depicts a failed US government experiment which transports a small American town into an alternative version of the US run by believers in a form of Christianity known as Gnosticism, who are engaged in a bitter war with the "Spanish" in Mexico (the chief scientist at the laboratory where the experiment occurred is described as a Gnostic, and references to Christian Gnosticism appear repeatedly in the book). In Time for Patriots by retired astronomer Thomas Wm. Hamilton (4897 Tomhamilton) a town and military academy on Long Island are transported back to 1770, where they shorten the American Revolution, rewrite the Constitution, prolong Mozart's life, battle Barbary pirates, and have other adventures.

Although not dealing in physical time travel, in his alt-history novel Marx Returns, Jason Barker introduces anachronisms into the life and times of Karl Marx, such as when his wife Jenny sings a verse from the Sex Pistols's song "Anarchy in the U.K.", or in the games of chess she plays with the Marxes' housekeeper Helene Demuth, which on one occasion involves a Caro–Kann Defence. In her review of the novel, Nina Power writes of "Jenny’s 'utopian' desire for an end to time", an attitude which, according to Power, is inspired by her husband's co-authored book The German Ideology. However, in keeping with the novel's anachronisms, the latter was not published until 1932. By contrast, the novel's timeline ends in 1871.

In fantasy genre

The Angevin Empire in 1172, before the point of divergence of Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series

Many works of straight fantasy and science fantasy take place in historical settings, though with the addition of, for example, magic or mythological beasts. Some present a secret history in which the modern day world no longer believes that these elements ever existed. Many ambiguous alternate/secret histories are set in Renaissance or pre-Renaissance times, and may explicitly include a "retreat" from the world, which would explain the current absence of such phenomena. Other stories make plan a divergence of some kind.

In Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions in which the Matter of France is history and the fairy folk are real and powerful. The same author's A Midsummer Tempest, occurs in a world in which the plays of William Shakespeare (called here "the Great Historian"), presented the literal truth in every instance. The novel itself takes place in the era of Oliver Cromwell and Charles I. Here, the English Civil War had a different outcome, and the Industrial Revolution has occurred early.

Randall Garrett's "Lord Darcy" series presents a point of divergence: a monk systemizes magic rather than science, so the use of foxglove to treat heart disease is regarded as superstition. Another point of divergence occurs in 1199, when Richard the Lionheart survives the Siege of Chaluz and returns to England and makes the Angevin Empire so strong that it survives into the 20th century.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke takes place in an England where a separate Kingdom ruled by the Raven King and founded on magic existed in Northumbria for over 300 years. In Patricia Wrede's Regency fantasies, Great Britain has a Royal Society of Wizards.

The Tales of Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card (a parallel to the life of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement) takes place in an alternate America, beginning in the early 19th century. Prior to that time, a POD occurred: England, under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, had banished "makers", or anyone else demonstrating "knacks" (an ability to perform seemingly supernatural feats) to the North American continent. Thus the early American colonists embraced as perfectly ordinary these gifts, and counted on them as a part of their daily lives. The political division of the continent is considerably altered, with two large English colonies bookending a smaller "American" nation, one aligned with England, and the other governed by exiled Cavaliers. Actual historical figures are seen in a much different light: Ben Franklin is revered as the continent's finest "maker", George Washington was executed after being captured, and "Tom" Jefferson is the first president of "Appalachia", the result of a compromise between the Continentals and the Crown.

On the other hand, when the "Old Ones" (fairies) still manifest themselves in England in Keith Roberts's Pavane, which takes place in a technologically backward world after a Spanish assassination of Elizabeth I allowed the Spanish Armada to conquer England, the possibility that the fairies were real but retreated from modern advances makes the POD possible: the fairies really were present all along, in a secret history.

Again, in the English Renaissance fantasy Armor of Light by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett, the magic used in the book, by Dr. John Dee and others, actually was practiced in the Renaissance; positing a secret history of effective magic makes this an alternate history with a point of departure. Sir Philip Sidney survives the Battle of Zutphen in 1586, and shortly thereafter saving the life of Christopher Marlowe.

When the magical version of our world's history is set in contemporary times, the distinction becomes clear between alternate history on the one hand and contemporary fantasy, using in effect a form of secret history (as when Josepha Sherman's Son of Darkness has an elf living in New York City, in disguise) on the other. In works such as Robert A. Heinlein's Magic, Incorporated where a construction company can use magic to rig up stands at a sporting event and Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos and its sequel Operation Luna, where djinns are serious weapons of war—with atomic bombs—the use of magic throughout the United States and other modern countries makes it clear that this is not secret history—although references in Operation Chaos to degaussing the effects of cold iron make it possible that it is the result of a POD. The sequel clarifies this as the result of a collaboration of Einstein and Planck in 1901, resulting in the theory of "rhea tics". Henry Moseley applies this theory to "degauss the effects of cold iron and release the goetic forces." This results in the suppression of ferromagnetism and the re-emergence of magic and magical creatures.

Alternate history shades off into other fantasy subgenres when the use of actual, though altered, history and geography decreases, although a culture may still be clearly the original source; Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds and its sequels take place in a fantasy world, albeit one clearly based on China, and with allusions to actual Chinese history, such as the Empress Wu. Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters incorporates ancient Chinese physics and Greek Aristotelian physics, using them as if factual.

Alternate history has long been a staple of Japanese speculative fiction with such authors as Futaro Yamada and Ryō Hanmura writing novels set in recognizable historical settings withaddded supernatural or science fiction elements. Ryō Hanmura's 1973 Musubi no Yama Hiroku which recreated 400 years of Japan's history from the perspective of a secret magical family with psychic abilities. The novel has since come to be recognized as a masterpiece of Japanese speculative fiction. Twelve years later, author Hiroshi Aramata wrote the groundbreaking Teito Monogatari which reimagined the history of Tokyo across the 20th century in a world heavily influenced by the supernatural.

The TV show Sliders explores different possible alternate realities by having the protagonist "slide" into different parallel dimensions of the same planet Earth. Another TV show Motherland: Fort Salem explores a female-dominated world in which witchcraft is real. Its world diverged from our timeline when the Salem witch trials are resolved by an agreement between witches and ungifted humans.

Video games

For the same reasons that this genre is explored by role-playing games, alternate history is also an intriguing backdrop for the storylines of many video games. A famous example of an alternate history game is Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Released in 1996, the game presents a point of divergence in 1946 in which Albert Einstein goes back in time to prevent World War II from ever taking place by erasing Adolf Hitler from time after he is released from Landsberg Prison in 1924. Einstein is successful in his mission, but in the process, he allows Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union to become powerful enough to launch a massive campaign to conquer Europe.

In the Civilization series, the player guides a civilization from prehistory to the present and creates radically altered versions of history on a long time scale. Several scenarios recreate a particular period, which becomes the "point of divergence" in an alternate history shaped by the player's actions. Popular examples in Sid Meier's Civilization IV include Desert War, set in the Mediterranean theatre of World War II and featuring scripted events tied to possible outcomes of battles; Broken Star, set in a hypothetical Russian civil war in 2010; and Rhye's and Fall of Civilization, an 'Earth simulator' designed to mirror a history as closely as possible but incorporating unpredictable elements to provide realistic alternate settings.

In some games such as the Metal Gear and Resident Evil series, events that were originally intended to represent the near future when the games were originally released later ended up becoming alternate histories in later entries in those franchises. For example, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990), set in 1999, depicted a near future that ended up becoming an alternate history in Metal Gear Solid (1998). Likewise, Resident Evil (1996) and Resident Evil 2 (1998), both set in 1998, depicted near-future events that had later become an alternative history by the time Resident Evil 4 (2005) was released.

In the 2009 steampunk shooter, Damnation is set on an alternate version of planet Earth, in the early 20th century after the American Civil War, which had spanned over several decades, and steam engines replace combustion engines. The game sees the protagonists fighting off a rich industrialist who wants to do away with both the Union and the Confederacy in one swift movement and turn the United States of America into a country called the "American Empire" with a totalitarian dictatorship.

A balkanized 1930s North America from the Crimson Skies franchise

Crimson Skies is one example of an alternate history spawning multiple interpretations in multiple genres. The stories and games in Crimson Skies take place in an alternate 1930s United States in which the nation crumbled into many hostile states following the effects of the Great Depression, the Great War, and Prohibition. With the road and railway system destroyed, commerce took to the skies, which led to the emergence of air pirate gangs who plunder the aerial commerce.

The game Freedom Fighters portrays a situation similar to that of the movie Red Dawn and Red Alert 2 but less comically than the latter. The point of divergence is during World War II in which the Soviet Union develops an atomic bomb first and uses it on Berlin. With the balance of power and influence tipped in Russia's favor, history diverges. Brief summaries at the beginning of the game inform the player of the Communist bloc's complete takeover of Europe by 1953, a different ending to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the spread of Soviet influence into South America and Mexico.

Similarly, the 2007 video game World in Conflict is set in 1989, with the Soviet Union on the verge of collapse. The point of divergence is several months before the opening of the game, when Warsaw Pact forces staged a desperate invasion of Western Europe. As the game begins, a Soviet invasion force lands in Seattle and takes advantage of the fact that most of the US military is in Europe.

The game Battlestations: Pacific, released in 2008, offered in alternate history campaign for the Imperial Japanese Navy in which Japan destroys all three carriers in the Battle of Midway, which is followed by a successful invasion of the island. That causes the United States to lack any sort of aerial power to fight the Japanese and to be continuously forced onto the defense.

Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, released in February 2008, is an alternate history first-person shooter in which Winston Churchill died in 1931 from being struck by a taxi cab. Therefore, Great Britain lacks the charismatic leader needed to keep the country together and allows it to be successfully conquered by Nazi Germany during Operation Sea Lion in 1940. Germany later conquers the rest of Europe, as well as North Africa and the Middle East, and produces a massive number of Wunderwaffe. The Axis powers launch a surprise invasion of the isolationist United States in the Eastern Seaboard in 1953, which forces the country to surrender and submit to a puppet government.

Promotional booth for Fallout: New Vegas from PAX 2010

Another alternate history game involving Nazis is War Front: Turning Point in which Hitler died during the early days of World War II and so a much more effective leadership rose to power. Under the command of a new Führer (who is referred to as "Chancellor", with his real name never being revealed), Operation Sealion succeeds, and the Nazis successfully conquer Britain and spark a cold war between them and the Allied Powers.

The Fallout series of computer role-playing games is set in a divergent US, whose history after World War II diverges from the real world to follow a retro-futuristic timeline. For example, fusion power was invented quite soon after the end of the war, but the transistor was never developed. The result was a future that has a 1950s "World of Tomorrow" feel to it, with extremely high technology like artificial intelligence implemented with thermionic valves and other technologies that are now considered obsolete.

Many game series by the Swedish developer Paradox Interactive start at a concise point in history and allow the player to immerse in the role of a contemporary leader and alter the course of in-game history. The most prominent game with that setting is Crusader Kings II.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games have an alternate history at the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in which a special area called "The Zone" is formed.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is set in an alternate 1960 in which the Nazis won World War II and do so also by acquiring high technology. The sequel Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus continues that but is set in the conquered United States of America.

Online

Fans of alternate history have made use of the internet from a very early point to showcase their own works and provide useful tools for those fans searching for anything alternate history, first in mailing lists and usenet groups, later in web databases and forums. The "Usenet Alternate History List" was first posted on April 11, 1991, to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf-lovers. In May 1995, the dedicated newsgroup soc.history.what-if was created for showcasing and discussing alternate histories. Its prominence declined with the general migration from unmoderated usenet to moderated web forums, most prominently AlternateHistory.com, the self-described "largest gathering of alternate history fans on the internet" with over 10,000 active members.

In addition to these discussion forums, in 1997 Uchronia: The Alternate History List was created as an online repository, now containing over 2,900 alternate history novels, stories, essays, and other printed materials in several different languages. Uchronia was selected as the Sci Fi Channel's "Sci Fi Site of the Week" twice.