Alternate history (n.) is like replaying an argument in the shower, where one better line and everything goes your way.
Alternate history (n.) flatters the present by showing how much worse the accident could have gone.
An Alternate history (n.) amplifies one wrong turn until the map looks foreign.
An Alternate history (n.) requires believing that one thing could have changed and everything else would have waited.
American history (n.) is taught fastest in May, when the school year runs out before the twentieth century does.
American history (n.) gets shorter the closer it comes to anyone still alive.
American history (n.) is like a family album where someone keeps cropping the edges.
American history (n.) is taught as a list of things that were fixed, in the order they were fixed.
Antiquarian history (n.) knows only how to preserve life, not how to engender it; it paralyses the man of action, who as one who acts will and must offend some piety or other.