An opinion column published by the writer argues that history, as a discipline, must record what actually happened rather than speculate on what did not, reviving a long-running debate over the value of so-called counterfactual or alternative history.
The piece opens by citing the British historian Edward H. Carr, who described history as a chronicle of what people have done, not of what they failed to do. According to the column, it is the historian's task, based on reliable empirical evidence, to record events in a way that allows for their objective understanding.
The author lists a series of settled historical facts to illustrate the point: that Christopher Columbus reached a New World in 1492, that the American and French Revolutions took place in 1776 and 1789 respectively, that Dominicans proclaimed their independence and founded the Dominican Republic in 1844, that the 20th century saw two world wars of catastrophic scale, and that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 followed by the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991. These, the column argues, are concrete events that truly occurred and cannot be altered.
Fiction versus objective history
The column distinguishes between two opposing ways of writing history: fictionalized or novelized history, and objective or scientific history. Citing the writer Vetilio Alfau Durán, the author says the latter should not be reshaped by mere rhetorical tropes and must not be modified to serve political or personal interests.
From there, the column turns to what it calls the genre of counterfactual or alternative history. It cites the British historian Richard J. Evans, who defined counterfactual events as alternative versions of the past in which a change in the sequence of events leads to a different outcome from what actually happened.
A 1990s resurgence
The practice of reflecting on the past through counterfactual scenarios is not new, the column notes, but it says the 1990s saw a resurgence of the approach among professional historians in both the United States and England, producing a substantial body of literature within the field.
The author describes counterfactual history, also called virtual history, as a purely speculative or hypothetical tool. Starting from a divergent premise, the analyst arrives at alternative conclusions that alter the past, moving the exercise closer to fiction than to objective history.
The column frames the method around the classic question of what would have happened if a given event had unfolded differently, a line of thought it says can lead to the construction of myths or to a simple distortion of the past. For some historians, the piece adds, this kind of reflection is better suited to lighthearted after-dinner conversation than to serious scholarly debate.
The risk of 'uchronia'
Because the exercise starts from a real historical event and then adds possible courses of action that never existed, the column argues that anyone attempting it is forced to build imaginary scenarios. It says this risks what the French philosopher Charles Renouvier, writing in the early 20th century, called uchronia: history not as it happened, but as it could have happened.
The Duarte example
To illustrate the method, the column offers a concrete case from Dominican history. In July 1844, in the Cibao region, General Juan Pablo Duarte was acclaimed President of the Republic on the initiative of General Ramón Matías Mella. Duarte turned down the spontaneous popular gesture because it had not come from a democratic electoral process.
The counterfactual question the column poses is what would have happened had Duarte accepted that acclamation. The piece ends there, marked as the first installment of a series, with the author signaling that the discussion will continue in a future column.
