Newt Gingrich has referred to himself as a historian so often that people are starting to repeat it. But more accurately, Gingrich is an alternate historian. In the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg writes about Gingrich's alt-history novels:

They make up a pair of loose trilogies, one set in the Civil War (the rebels win more battles than they did in real life, but still lose), the other in the Second World War (same deal with Germany and Japan). Unlike their betters, these books forgo playful speculation about how the present might be different. They’re heavy on gory battle scenes and windy pontification. Reviewing one of them, a Washington Post critic wrote, “It is torture from first to last, downright embarrassing in its clumsy prose and lurching plot.”

The essay is also noteworthy because it includes the following sentence, which I love: "As a futurist, Gingrich has imagined “populism in space,” honeymoons on the Moon, and theme parks with real live dinosaurs." Go read it.