The Foreign Past Is A Country (Nationhood through the Lens of Alternate History)

National identity is the result of a personal and unstable alchemical mixing of history, myth, social conditioning, and imagined landscape. This is not some fixed point, but rather a disputed, illusory, and ever mutable interpretation of one’s relationship with the country they live in. Some people have a devotion to their country that can only be described as religious, as their beliefs seem immune to evidence-based critique. Others treat their national identity with a dismissiveness that implies tertiary importance. Alternate history narratives can offer a useful platform from which to interrogate national identity, to play with the facts that created the myths. Rewriting pivotal events can expose how the events that shape national narratives are contingent, rather than the inevitabilities that are sometimes re-storied by proud nationalists.Historian Robert Sobel's onlywork of fiction earned hima special Sidewise Award(image via Goodreads)This is perhaps why so much alternate…