His name is one of the most infamous in American politics. In the early 1950s, Senator Joe McCarthy was a force of terror, sparing no one in his hunt for Soviet agents within the US government. Yet, on a journey from a park bench in New York City to the fields of rural Wisconsin and into the halls of power in Washington, his incredible rise to power is part of the most audacious gambit in the annals of Soviet espionage. When McCarthy targets his master's opponents, however, secrets will be...

Ireland is a country that is, in many ways, still defined by the British occupation and the nature of its partition and independence and so there is much room to explore how it could have evolved differently in different circumstances.What would home rule have looked like in practice? What struggles would an Ireland that won independence in the late 18th century have faced? How would Ireland have positioned itself if the Nazis had won the Second World War?In this collection, thirteen talen...

The United States is, relatively speaking, a new country; the colonies from which it sprung were settled by Europeans in the seventeenth century, and it gained independence only in the late eighteenth century. Despite this relative youth, the country has been host to a rich tradition of folklore and tall tales. This begs the question: if the country's fate had turned out differently, what would have this storytelling tradition have looked like? What stories would be told in these other Ame...

What will the end of the world be like?Plague or nuclear fire? Asteroids or floods?Divine wrath or people meddling with what should have been left alone?The apocalypse may come in the future, but what apocalypses might have occurred if history had played out differently? What if nukes had flown during the Cuban Missile Crisis? What if an asteroid had been on a collision course with Earth before the first person could set foot on the Moon? What if humanity destroyed it...