The Days in Dixie

It's highly improbable for the Confederacy to win the War between the States, given TFSmith121's infographic that has popped up before. So, I'm positing an alternate alternate war.

----

Overseas Territories of the Confederacy (Wikipedia)

Confederate Polynesia, a Confederate territory, was first claimed in 1834 by American Captain William Danforth, who created a small village called Wallis Town for the British explorer who visited the island in 1767, with a settlement of 45 Americans. Later, in 1841, several additional ships settled on the island of Tahiti, founding the village of Franklin (OTL Papeete), the capital of the territory to this day.

Solomon Islands, a negotiated territory in 1900 between Germany and the CSA. The CSA negotiated a split that allowed Germany to keep Bougainville as part of German New Guinea, while the CSA kept the islands.

Former Overseas Territories of the Confederacy

Caroline Islands - ceded in 1900 as part of the deal to gain the Solomon Islands. They were seen as too widely scattered and not having enough land for a coaling station.

Puerto Rico - after the Spanish-American-Confederate War in 1898, the United States received the Philippines, Guam, and the Marianas Islands, while the Confederacy received the island of Puerto Rico, already an island destination for Cuban Confederates and Floridians. It became a state in 1959, along with the Virgin Islands.

Virgin Islands - became a state in 1959. Purchased from the Danish in 1917, the British Virgin Islands were ceded in 1942 as part of the agreement to provide war material for the United Kingdom in World War 2.

----

Texas German (Wikipedia)

Texas German (German: Texasdeutsch) is a German language dialect spoken by descendants of German immigrants who settled in Texas in the mid-19th century. These "German Texans" founded the towns of New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, Boerne, Walburg, and Comfort in Texas Hill Country, and Schulenburg and Weimar to the east. Today, their presence is felt in a number of areas of Texas, with Texas German spoken by 12.48% of the population today.

It is a mixture of 19th century German and English, with such words as "der Hamburger" and "der Cowboy," and using the simple past and simple subjunctives as opposed to the more common perfect (bin gegangen vs ging) and periphrastic subjunctive in Europe (würde gehen, vs. ginge).

The language is widespread enough in the major metropolitan areas that 'Little Germany' sections of Dallas, Houston, and Austin are tourist destinations, as well as major party destinations during Oktoberfest, with festivities, rides, beer halls, and souvenirs. The TV Show "Walker, Texas Ranger" featured a Texas German Ranger Angie Fischer (Eva Habermann) in its final seasons, and the show Bones featured the forensic anthropologist Stefanie Bauer, based loosely on the life and work of Kathy Reichs.

It is not to be confused with Rio Grande German, which is actually related to a Low German dialect spoken in the eastern, Prussian states of Germany (East Prussia, West Prussia), similarly adapted to American measurements and legal terminology (de County, de Meile, de Foot, de Snack)

Well, consider me intrigued. Looking forward to seeing how that came to happen.

Franklin Institution

Based in Richmond, VA, the Franklin Institution is named for the famous American scientist and polymath. It was founded in 1871 as a counterpart to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, hoping to spur on Confederate research and science, by Jewish Confederate Albert Moses Luria, whose father Raphael Moses served as chief commissary officer for General Toombs.


Lt. Albert Moses Luria

He was wounded on 31 May 1862 at the Battle of Seven Pines in Virginia after courageously throwing a live Union artillery shell out of his fortification before it exploded, thereby saving the lives of many of his compatriots. He continued to serve until the end of the war, after which time he found himself in Richmond, VA. Luria recalled in his own journal how he saw a tattered Stars-and-Bars flag trampled on the ground by some retreating Union soldiers one day, and grabbed it off the battlefield after they had left, and spent his time restoring it, hand-sewing it himself in his off-duty hours. Luria's interest in preserving Confederate history grew, and the role of Jewish Confederates, 10,000 of which served in the Confederate Armed Forces. Joseph Goldsmith, known as the 'Jewish Confederate Chaplain,' gave him the impetus to begin collecting the stories and artifacts of veterans in the early 1870s. First housed in a few rooms in a hotel in Richmond, by 1875, the collection had grown beyond just war memorabilia, to include scientific advancements, and quickly crowded the rooms before he decided to find a new place for the collection.

Luria and Goldsmith, along with General Samuel Cooper, who had experienced some success post-war, created a campaign to raise funds for a Confederate Science and History Museum, which would soon change its name to the Franklin Institution, to be housed in Richmond, Virginia. Though the south was not as rich as the Union, donations in trimes, half dimes, and dimes, the requested amounts, flowed in. Within five years, the trio were able to begin construction on the building, located near the (at that time) Confederate Capitol. The design somewhat resembled a cathedral, leading to some newspapers calling it the "Confederate Cathedral."


Front façade of the Franklin Institution.


Interior Courtyard of the building.

Completed in 1883, the new building was opened by the President of the Confederacy, P.G.T. Beauregard to a crowd of over 5,000. Exhibits ranged from war memorabilia to history exhibits from the Revolutionary War (with addenda detailing their inspiration to the Confederate cause), and even the first dinosaur skeleton, then called Antedemus (now the Allosaurus), discovered by William Edward Somerville, leading to a dinosaur craze across the South and in the Union, with museums racing to find new species in a scientific competition between the two nations.

The Franklin Institution now covers a much larger swath of history than at its start, including such diverse fields as biology, astronomy, entomology, paleontology, environmental science, mechanical engineering, history, genetics, and linguistics. It outgrew its 'cathedral' building in Richmond, adding the Confederate Air and Space Museum, the William Jones Museum (dedicated to Black Confederate history and culture, opened in 1973), Confederate Indian Museum, Confederate Museum of Natural History, Confederate Museum of Science and Technology, the Ambrosio Gonzales Museum of Confederate Hispanic History (named for the Cuba Colonel from the War between the States), Angela Hurst Confederate Art Museum, Museum of Confederate History, Confederate Postal Museum, Franklin Confederate Art Museum, and the Franklin Botanical Garden and Zoological Park. All but the last are located opposite the Capitol, in a rectangle that's now directly opposite the Old Town Hall in Richmond. The original cathedral is still the headquarters of the Franklin Institution to this day.