While professional historians have traditionally been scornful of alternate history, with the decline of historical determinism some academic historians have also embraced the genre. Many nations have produced it one of the first was France (a novel written in the immediate aftermath of Waterloo celebrating a Napoleonic world-empire), and today the franchise has expanded to include British, German, Japanese, Swedish, Italian, Brazilian, Finnish, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, and Spanish examples. If you use to browse books by category, you will find more than twenty best-selling titles, and the best Web site on alternate history, Uchronia, lists thousands. Now it’s being produced in industrial quantities. People have been writing alternate history since at least the early nineteenth century, but for most of that time it was a tiny subgenre of popular fiction.