It really takes some doing to torpedo a premise this sound, but they've managed it. In a book that's supposed to contain alternate history short stories, most of the stories just explain what actually happened, then in the last paragraph say "Of course, it's impossible to predict what would have happened if this thing X had went otherwise, so we won't even try".

For another thing, almost every one of the writers goes out of his way to say "nyah nyah" to the idea that history is mostly about other things than what person X or person Y happened to do, which I personally find a lot more worthwhile subject to study. Then there's the totally missing use of the accepted term "alternate history" and blatant attemps to instigate the usage of "counterfactual" instead, which is just pure snobbishness.