Just realized that Dachs, Masada, and Owen are all male but have female avatars.
Would reading
alternate history be helpful?
'The Years of Rice and Salt' sounds extremely interesting... from an anthropological perspective as well.
And you're not an outrageously funny guy with a Comedy Central show. So?
I don't tend to like most mass-market alternate history books, because usually the alternate history parts are pretty bad alternate history - not plausible departures, like Owen said, or parallelism for the sake of parallelism, and so on - while not actually being very good
novels either. Harry Turtledove is the most outrageous of the practitioners of this, but S.M. Stirling and Kim Stanley Robinson do that stuff, too. In my opinion, one of the best works of alternate history,
Fatherland, is good precisely because it doesn't get hung up on the history part: Harris just states that the Nazis won the war and otherwise focuses on character development and the noir mystery part.
That tends to mean that alternate historical fiction, even when it is good, doesn't really teach you much about history.
Owen mentioned that I, among other people on CFC, have written alternate history; the link to what is probably my best work is in my sig, under "Alternate History Timeline - Eurasian War". I bring this up less to toot my own horn and more to say that I designed the timeline in the way I did specifically to highlight a lot of misconceptions I feel that most people seem to have regarding the history of the early twentieth century. The writing style, which is sort of dry and history-book-y (certainly not a novel), is not for everyone, but I tried to make it as entertaining as I could within those parameters.
Frequently, historians who make a big deal about alternate history as a tool for understanding history don't really do that very well, either. Niall "Fire His Ass" Ferguson once wrote a book called
The Pity of War, in which he claimed, among other things, that the First World War was such a disaster for European society and the world because, supposedly, Imperial Germany was on its way to peacefully creating a European economic union several decades "ahead of schedule", and that the warmongering of the Entente messed that up. Leave aside that the trend, insofar as it was pointing in any direction, was not pointing in that one. There's just simply no way to predict events in the future based on
any historical trends with any reliability. The consequences of any given action eighty years in the future are completely unknowable. That's why it's alternate historical
fiction.
Several historians - the quintessential paper here is the work of Tetlock and Belkin - think that counterfactual conjectures are less valuable for explaining how things
might have happened and more so for explaining why things happened the way they did. You know, more like, "Napoleon could not plausibly have conquered Russia in 1812, because even if X had happened, Y would have probably offset it," and so on, and so forth. Or, "the end of the Western Roman Empire was a pretty close-run thing at several points, and events that effectively amounted to bad luck went against its survival every time". You get the idea.