One variant on historical novels is the "What If?" story or alternate history. It is usually a well-researched story, but takes one event and changes the outcome, and then follows the consequences of that change.
Because the history detailed in a novel of this type is not our history, but that of a "parallel universe," and because many of the authors of these novels are beter known as SF/fantasy authors, they are usually shelved with SF/fantasy rather than with other historical novels. But there are no SF or fantasy "gimmicks" in these novels. The only "gimmick" is the "what if?" event.
I recently read two different speculations about what might have happened during the Civil War if England decided to join in on the side of the Confederacy. Both took as their trigger point the Trent incident.
In November, 1861, the British naval packet HMS Trent was stopped and boarded by the USS San Jacinto, and two of her passangers, the Confederate diplomats recently appointed to England and France, were removed.
This was a breach of international maritime law. Although it could be considered an act of war, normally the violated country just demanded an apology and reparations. The Union's apology was half-hearted and she offered no reparations. Prime Minister Palmerston and his majority Whig party aready was leaning toward supporting the Confederacy because of the loss of the cotton trade due to the Union blockades.
In real life, Prince Albert was a voice of reason who averted the war, but he was dying of tuberculosis and slipped into a coma from which he never awoke only days later. The two stories have him succumb early, unable to complete that last and greatest service to Queen and Country.
Robert Conroy's 1862 is the one book, and Harry Harrison's Stars and Stripes trilogy is the other story.
Conroy's story is more true to the concept of a "what if?" in that everything proceeds almost inevitably from England's decision to declare war.
Harrison cheats a little. When the British navy gets lost, and destroys Biloxi, Mississippi thinking that it is Union-held New Orleans, The North and the South decide to put aside their "internal" differences until they have dealt with the foreign invader.
(I'll give more details in separate posts as the week continues.)
Harry Turtledove has a whole series based on the assumption that Lee's battle plans for DC weren't intercepted by the Union. The South wins the War of Secession, and we later see WWI, the Depression, and WWII unfold/
I haven't read that series yet, but I have read his series about the last Western campaign under George Thomas and his battles against Hood around Nashville (Sentry Peak, Advance and Retreat, and Marching Through Peachtree).
It is basically a straight-forward historical account, but Turtledove "disguised" it as fantasy/alternate history by switching directions (it is described as an Eastern campaign where the South is fighting to free the [blond!] serfs in the North), by encoding names (George Thomas becomes "Doubting George," Nathan Bedford Forrest becomes "Ned of the Forest," William Tecumseh Sherman becomes "General Hesmucet," etc.) and by turning the railroads and telegraphs that gave the North a technological advantage into flying carpets and crystal balls.
Tom, the series is:
Is the Grapple out yet, Scott?
LA Public Library lists it as "ON ORDER". Guess it's not out yet.
Side note: There's a WorldWar/Colonization board for Turtledove on the SciFi Novels board. These don't qualify, for that.
Is the Grapple out yet, Scott?
Amazon.com still lists it as a pre-order.
Scott, Thanks for the heads up on the series. I'm almost done, at least until The Grapple is released.
Since the series begins with a war that replaces the Spanish-American War, the "What If?" is not really centered on the dropped battle plans, but on the possibility that the Confederacy was not re-absorbed into the Union after the Civil War. The plans are only used to explain why the South was in such a stronger position after the war.
The main idea seems to be to show that the South, which did produce the KKK and the Jim Crow laws, could just have easily produced the Nazi Party, or something very similar. The parallelism is not very subtle after all: Featherston = Hitler; Köenig = Göring; Goldman = Goebals; Al Smith = Neville Chamberlain; Kentucky = the Sudetenland; Ohio = Poland; "Freedom!" = "Sieg Heil!"; "Featherston!" = "Heil Hitler!"
Neither was Turtledove above a little subtle editorializing about our current administration. For example, the Freedom Party's tactic of deliberately misinterpreting a phrase in the constitution in order to disolve the Supreme Court is very similar to the Republican Party's tactic of misinterpreting a later phrase in the same section in an attempt to limit the Court's jurisdiction.
I noticed that all the generals and politicians were either actual historical figures or fictional composites, except for one. For some reason, Turledove changed Gen. Douglas MacArthur's first name to Daniel. I wonder if there is a concrete reason for that.
It was fun spotting the cameos by other famous people, usually deliberately left less than fully identified: Mark Twain, Louis Armstrong, Will Rogers, etc. I have to admit that, perhaps because he had a bigger role than some of the other cultural celebrities, I did not recognize that "Ernie" the ambulance driver and "hack writer" was Papa Hemmingway until he mentioned his (unfulfilled) plan to become a mercenary in Spain.
I missed that one about Ernie!
Conroy's alternate histories (mentioned in the first post) are good.
Eric Flint has two, based upon a single turning point -- Sam Houston is not seriously injured at the battle of Horseshoe Bend. From there, he extrapolates the remainder of the War of 1812, and how subsequent US history goes, through about 1824 or so.