What If? (essays)

"What If?", subtitled "The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been", is a collection of twenty essays and thirteen sidebars dealing with counterfactual history. It was published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1999, ISBN 0-399-14576-1, and this book as well as its two sequels, "What If? 2" and "What Ifs? of American History", were edited by Robert Cowley. It was later combined with What If? 2 to form "The Collected What If?".

Essays

*"Infectious Alternatives" by William H. McNeill
** What if a plague had not forced the Assyrians to withdraw from their siege of Jerusalem in 701 BC?
*"No Glory That Was Greece" by Victor Davis Hanson
** What if the Persians had won the Battle of Salamis?
*"Conquest Denied" by Josiah Ober
** What if Alexander the Great had died at the Battle of the Granicus River?
*"Furor Teutonicus: The Teutoburg Forest, A.D. 9" by Lewis H. Lapham
** What if Varus had defeated Arminius at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest?
*"The Dark Ages Made Lighter" by Barry S. Strauss
** What if the battles of Adrianople in 378 and Poitiers in 732 had been won by the Romans and the Muslims, respectively?
*"The Death That Saved Europe" by Cecelia Holland
** What if Ogadai Khan had "not" died in 1242 on the eve of the Mongol siege of Vienna?
*"If Only It Had Not Been Such a Wet Summer" by Theodore K. Rabb
** What if Suleiman the Magnificent had begun his 1529 siege of Vienna earlier in the year?
*"The Immolation of Hernán Cortés" by Ross Hassig
** What if Cortés had been killed or his expedition into Aztec-dominated Mexico had failed?
*"The Repulse of the English Fireships" by Geoffrey Parker
** What if the Spanish Armada had successfully landed in England?
*"Unlikely Victory" by Thomas Fleming
** What if the Americans lost the Revolutionary War? (Thirteen ways are presented here.)
*"What the Fog Wrought" by David McCullough
** What if George Washington and his forces had not escaped after losing the Battle of Long Island?
*"Ruler of the World" by Alistair Horne
** What if Napoleon Bonaparte had chosen to do several things differently?
*"If the Lost Order Hadn't Been Lost" by James M. McPherson
** What if Robert E. Lee had been able to march through Pennsylvania and Maryland without fighting the Battle of Antietam?
*"A Confederate Cannae and Other Scenarios" by Stephen W. Sears
** What if the Civil War had not lasted as long as it did? (Five ways are presented here.)
*"The What Ifs of 1914" by Robert Cowley
** What if Great Britain had remained neutral in World War I? (This and four other possibilities are presented here.)
*"How Hitler Could Have Won The War" by John Keegan
** What if the Wehrmacht had turned toward the Middle East instead of the Soviet Union?
*"Our Midway Disaster" by Theodore F. Cook, Jr.
** What if the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway?
*"D Day Fails" by Stephen E. Ambrose
** What if the Allied invasion of Europe had failed in June 1944?
*"Funeral in Berlin" by David Clay Large
** What if American and not Soviet forces had taken Berlin in 1945?
*"China Without Tears" by Arthur Waldron
** What if the Chinese Civil War had ended with Chiang Kai-shek "not" marching to retake Manchuria from Mao Zedong and the Communists?