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WHEN it comes to how history works, there are two basic theories: Tolstoy’s and America’s. Tolstoy wrote that the soldiers and other actors of the Napoleonic era “imagin[ed] that they knew what they were doing and did it of their own free will, but they all were involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work concealed from them but comprehensible to us.” The American theory, ingrained in our national character, is drastically different: The Mets won the 1986 World Series because Bill Buckner blew it. End of story.

The obvious corollary of the latter theory is that, in just about every case, the historical event in question could have turned out differently. This goes a long way toward explaining America’s love of “counterfactual history”— essays and stories examining the “what its” of the past. The most recent attempt to cater to this taste is Almost America: From the Colonists to Clinton: A “What If” History of the U.S. by Steve Tally (Quill, 368 pp., $14). Each of the book’s 28 chapters begins with the store of an actual event in the American past, up to a crucial point at which the author asks, What if this particular historical individual had chosen differently? Each chapter then gives a plausible account of the alternative America created be the counter actual choice, and—necessarily, one suspects, in an age of historical illiteracy—briefly summarizes the consequences of the choices that were actually made.

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WHEN it comes to how history works, there are two basic theories: Tolstoy’s and America’s. Tolstoy wrote that the soldiers and other actors of the Napoleonic era “imagin[ed] that they knew what they were doing and did it of their own free will, but they all were involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work concealed from them but comprehensible to us.” The American theory, ingrained in our national character, is drastically different: The Mets won the 1986 World Series because Bill Buckner blew it. End of story.

The obvious corollary of the latter theory is that, in just about every case, the historical event in question could have turned out differently. This goes a long way toward explaining America’s love of “counterfactual history”— essays and stories examining the “what its” of the past. The most recent attempt to cater to this taste is Almost America: From the Colonists to Clinton: A “What If” History of the U.S. by Steve Tally (Quill, 368 pp., $14). Each of the book’s 28 chapters begins with the store of an actual event in the American past, up to a crucial point at which the author asks, What if this particular historical individual had chosen differently? Each chapter then gives a plausible account of the alternative America created be the counter actual choice, and—necessarily, one suspects, in an age of historical illiteracy—briefly summarizes the consequences of the choices that were actually made.