Glen
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The Dominion of Southern America Timeline Discussion
Dominion of Southern America Timeline Part I
Dominion of Southern America Timeline Part II
Dominion of Southern America Timeline Part III
Dominion of Southern America Timeline Part IV
Dominion of Southern America Timeline Part V
Part V
Dominion of Southern America Timeline Part I
Dominion of Southern America Timeline Part II
Dominion of Southern America Timeline Part III
Dominion of Southern America Timeline Part IV
Dominion of Southern America Timeline Part V
Part V
Gaelic influences on US sports are manifold, both from the initial influx of Scots-Irish Presbyterians before the Revolution in the 1730s, as well as Irish Catholics after the revolution. The steady influx of Irish probably had a major impact on the development of ice hurley (indeed, the very name, hurley, is believed to have Celtic origins). Given it's position of the most northern nation in North America, it is not surprising that this team ice sport developed. By the mid 19th Century, its rules had been standardized and it was played throughout the USA. Unlike many other team sports, ice hurley had only nine players per team; one goalkeeper, four backs, and four forwards. While forward passing was allowed early, backs had to stay in their half of the ice field, and forwards had to stay on the opponent's side of the ice field.
It is not very surprising that the nations of Northern Europe also developed the game. Russia claimed to have developed antecedents to ice hurley, with a prominant rumor being that it was a game originating with the Vikings, who spread it throughout Europe, including the lands of Russia and Ireland. Scandinavia became early enthusiasts of the sport. the Korsgaardist regimes in Russia and Prussia-Poland embraced the sport as a heritage sport, though they basically took the whole of the modern American rules, just changing the names of ice hurley and its terms to match local history and language. However, after the collapse of the East after the Global War, only Russia used its own terms for the game, and even those evaporated after the start of international play in the first half of the twentieth century.
A large indoor ice arena, the largest ever to date, was built in Athens explicitly for ice sports for the 1930 inaugural Olympics, on which the biggest draw by far was the ice hurley competitions. The US and Russian teams made it to the championship game, which came down to sudden death, with the winning puck shot coming from legendary Franco-American ice hurley forward, Jacques Hebrard, whose statue can still be seen in front of Montreal's city hall.
In many ways, handball and football are two sides of the same coin, a coin minted in Great Britain.
While descriptions of games involving a large inflated ball being kicked or carried through a goal had been known for centuries, it was the 19th century that saw both the divergence and codification of the 'hand' and the 'foot' versions of the game. Born out of the rules of the Public Schools, at first the various versions involved different shaped balls, different amounts of use of catches and kicks, different numbers of playeers, different scoring methods, different shaped goals and just about any other variable of the game you care to imagine. However, with the development of passenger rail in the first half of the 19th century, interschool games became more and more common, and the movement was afoot to develop unified rules of the game to make these interschool games easier to conduct and follow for the spectators. While several things were mutually designated by the mid 19th century, such as the number of players per team (fifteen), starting the game with a scrimmage circle, the forward pass, continuous play except for injuries and the half, and the H shaped goalpost, a rift developed between supporters of kicking versus passing games, embodied by two men, George Illingworth and John Jolly.
George Illingworth of Yorkshire was the main proponent of the passing game, and his disdain for kicking grew as he engaged in a decades long public fight with John Jolly of Norfolk, the champion of the kicking game. The two engaged in constant letter writing to the press, extolling their preferred means of moving the ball, while also establishing and recruiting for the two great national game associations, Illingworth's British Association of Handballers (BAH), and Jolly's Football Association of Britain (FAB). Many public schools were divided over the camps, but with the Jolly's footballers slowly taking the majority of the schools under their aegis. On the University play level, both games often were played, and often there was fierce intracollegial rivalries between the handball and football fanatics who tried to prove the superiority of their sport.
The BAH developed the rules of handball, standardizing the shape of the ball as a prolate spheroid, felt to be more conductive to throwing and carrying, maintained the full tackle in order to shake loose the ball (except for the goalkeeper who was sacrosanct), and established that a player holding the ball in the behind (or end-field as it is sometimes called) scores one point, throwing the ball through the goalposts above the crossbar of the H goalpost scores two points, and getting the ball past the goalkeeper through the goalposts below the crossbar either by throwing or carrying scores four points.
The FAB of course codified football, but used a spherical ball designed for kicking and passing by foot, forbade use of the hands (except by the goalkeeper), forbade any throwing, outlawed the tackle, and maintained that scoring was only by kicking the ball above the crossbar between the H goalposts for one point, or kicking it past the goalkeeper below the crossbar between the goalposts for two points.
While Illingworth's handball game was less successful in recruiting Public Schools to his style of play, he did have one huge success, and that was convincing the British Army that his handball rules taught and improved tactical thinking among its players compared to football. The British soldiers would often play the handball game during their off times, and this led to the game spreading more rapidly than football to the colonies of the British Empire, especially the Dominion of Southern America in the aftermath of the Slaver Uprising. Many Empire Loyalists who had shed blood next to the British regulars played the game with their comrades in arms, and the Southrons can be said to have taken to the game like fish to water. Even the former Rebels eventually embraced the game as a true manly pursuit. By the early twentieth century, the game had even spread to their neighbor to the north, the USA, one of the few non-Imperial nations to take to handball.
Jolly's football had its own successes beyond the Public Schools of Great Britain, as it was embraced by many of the young men of quality in Europe. It spread early and rapidly among the European upper classes, and was difficult to suppress during the Korsgaardist era in Eastern Europe, where it was felt to be too British. However, after the Global War football saw a resurgence in Eastern Europe, and by the twentieth century it was the most common game played throughout the continent.
One major exception to the handball/football divide was Ireland, which held to its own form of ball, called caid (after an older version of a ball game native to Ireland, though much different in rules and form). Caid adopted all the common features of British handball and football, used the tackle and scoring of handball, but kept the ability to kick the ball, and in fact required that after 15 steps the ball had to be thrown or kicked. The ball (spherical as in football) could be caught or run into the behind (end-field) for a point, and either kicked or thrown through the upper part of the goal for two points, and the lower part guarded by the goalkeeper for four points.
Both handball and football were Olympic sports at the 1930 Olympic games, though caid did not have enough international support to be included. The Dominion of Southern America, fielding its own team, took the championship for handball, but England, birthplace of the sport, won for football.
Prior to the 20th century, the closest that the world came to decimalization was during the French Revolution. However, those efforts (and similar ones by Jefferson and French Emigres to Quebec) came to naught in the end. It was not until the late 19th century and early 20th century that interest began again, particularly in the science community, to develop universal standards of measurement based on true universals, especially as physics advanced and more became known about the physical constants of the universe. Based on work on black body radiating and the speed of light in a void, standards were normalized to make the mathematics of science more streamlined, and decimalization then was used to scale these measures for more human use. The units for electrical charge were easily accepted as they were not in common use otherwise, and while there was significant resistance, length, mass, and temperature also made inroads even into regular life, but time was the most problematic desire most had to retain the relation of time to the length of the day (though even the length of a 'day' was variable over the year). Given the lead the Royal Society took in promulgating scientific measures, many of them co-opted old English terms for measures. The science charge (sc) was as mentioned readily accepted into the population, and the science mile (sm) became the standard for measuring distances (given how close it worked to previous definitions of mile this was an easier transition with 1 science 'mile' = 1.004 old English miles). The science pound (sp) massed about 48% of the old English pound and was also able to find widespread use. The science degree (sd) for temperature also became standard for scientific works and often was found marked along with the more traditional Fahrenheit or Celsius measures of temperature. The science second (ss) equalling approximately 0.54 old English second, would mostly be confined to scientific equations and work as the best decimalized fit to the Earth day would have required a new 16 'science hour' day, and this did not work out with the world's population, though 'scientific clocks' do sell as novelty items.
The history of the boot known as Southrons outside the Dominion, Wellesleys historically, or most commonly in the DSA, Riders, is one that can theoretically be traced back to the boots of Genghis Khan but more directly to the Hessian boot.
The Hessian boot was the inspiration for General Arthur Wellesley's own boot design during his service against Napoleon, simplifying and improving on the Hessian design.
The Wellesley boot became the favorite of the British Army and was in wide use by officers of the British army and Southern Loyalists during the Slaver Rebellion. After the war, many Loyalists continued to wear the versatile ririding boot as yet another symbol of their loyalty to the mother country, and slowly even former Rebels grudgingly came to recognize the value of the boot style, though many chose to adopt a more Cubano heel. By the 20th Century, the boots had become synonymous with the people of the Dominion of Southern America.
The boom in the size of urban areas in the first third of the 20th century was a source of pride and a sign of progress for some, though a spectre of overcrowding to the Malthusians. In the United States of America, the top five most populous metropolises were:
1. New York City, NY/Washington DC - By 1930 the borders between the nation's busiest port and the nation's capital just up the Hudson were beginning to blur making this region not just the most populous in the USA but one of the largest in the world (though still no match for Imperial London).
2. Chicago, IL - Strategically located in the heart of the nation and the intersection between the great waterways of the Great Lakes/St Lawrence & the mighty Mississippi (as.well as the border between Illinois and Michigan), Chicago was a thriving metropolis in its own right by 1930.
3. Philadelphia, PA - a historical rival of NYC for greatest.US metropolis, the city of brotherly love was.only unseated from number 2 to 3 by 1930.
4. Montreal, QU - The great commercial capital of Francophone America, also benefitting from an initial strong position on the great waterways of the Northeast, Montreal was able to hold the number 4 position in population in 1930.
5. Fort Finney, WA - While some might have thought Fort Finney a dark horse for a top ten US city, it was able to build on its steamship heritage to become one of the major industrial centers of the nation in 1930.
The Dominion of Southern America, though not as populous as it's northern neighbor the USA, did enjoy healthy population growth in the first third of the 20th century as well. The top five metropolitan areas of the DSA in 1930 were:
1. New Orleans, LO/Baton Rouge CD - Likened to the merging NYC/Washington complex to the north, the Dominion's busiest port and capItalian together formed by far the largest population center in the British South.
2. San Diego, AL - San Diego was the crown jewel of the province of Albion, both as the primary Pacific port of the Dominion, the main western terminus for Southron transcontinental rail lines, as well as a major center for Kinee production.
3. Jackson, TE - The major port of the province of Texas was also the major port for oil exports from the Dominion.
4. Havana, CU - Havana was the jewel of the Caribbean Dominion, and by 1930 the premiere vacation destination within the Dominion.
5. New Dover, TE - This Texas city was the youngest of the top five Dominion top 5 cities of 1930, and owed it's incredible growth to it's strategic position at the nexus of the transcontinental rail lines of the Dominion as well as the main route for herding cattle up to the USA.
The series of famines that struck several continents in the latter half of the 1920s suggested that the growing global Malthusian movement had credence. The first one hit Central Africa, sending many famine refugees to flood Kongo.
However, the most significant of the famines was the one that struck Chuen China. The death toll is believed to have reached 5 million. A faction of the Imperial Bureaucracy saw this as a sign that Western Malthusianism might have value, when properly tempered with Confucian wisdom.
The Subcontinental Crisis and subsequent split between the British Empire and UNI (United Nationalities of India), left the status of the 15 Gurkha Regiments in a sort of limbo. At the time of the split, only 5 regiments were in India, the rest were deployed to British interests across the globe. The famed phlegmatic warriors of legend were highly sought after by both the Empire and the former Dominion. Those regiments in India were induced to stay with the new country of UNI, but the 10 Gurkha regiments abroad were adamant that they would remain in the service of the British sovereign. Many saw this as a pragmatic move given the large pensions (the equal to what British career soldiers could expect since the reign of Elizabeth) the Gurkhas expected to obtain through their service to the Crown. Indeed, to retain the remaining Gurkhas in India the UNI coalition government had to match those rates, much to the chagrin of other units of the nascent UNI military, coalescing around the old Dominion of India forces. The regiments that joined the UNI went through a slight renaming to become the UNI Gorkha Regiments.
One of the most stunning reactions to the fears of Malthusian overpopulation was the revival of the Thuggies. Suppressed by the British in the early 19th century, most believed them extinct (some even claimed the whole Thuggie movement to be a British invention). However, in the late 20s it was revealed that a Neo-Thuggie cult had sprung up, this time straddling the globe. Their leader in hiding, Kala Phansigar, began issuing manifestos stating that the Thuggies would usher in the Age of Kali by sacrificing the excess population of the world. Phansigar claimed that the Thuggies had never been fully extinguished and had only gone into hiding until the world was in need of a full cleansing (most experts scoff at this claim to continuity with the original Thuggies). The Neo-Thuggies began to leave strangling victims in public places to announce the return of the Thuggie terror. This was followed by a series of bombings and shootings perpetrated in the name of Kali. Most of the atrocities were committed in the Indian subcontinent but could be found wherever significant Hindoo populations occurred throughout the British Empire, including the Dominion of Southern America, contributing significantly to discrimination of the Hindoo peoples out of fear for the Thuggies hiding in their midst. The DSA's neighbor to the North, the USA, wasn't immune from such panic, and the US Congress in 1933 passed the Thuggie Suppression Act, which among other things closed the US borders to immigration by Hindoos, whether from UNI, the DSA, or other parts of the British Empire.
The search for the North Pole was a long and complicated one, even more so in some ways than that for the South Pole. While the British dominated exploration of the Antarctic, it was the Americans, Russians, and Scandinavians who contended for the honor of conquering the boreal pole.
One of the earliest exploration attempts was by the Russians and the famed explorer Nikolai Rezanov. However, he quickly found the task too daunting and turned his sight on California.
An early American attempt to reach the North Pole by foot was the legendary attempt by Matoskah Appanoose of the Hudson Territory in 1895. His party were lost in the wilds of the far north, their final doomed base camp found in 1934.
Russia's other great attempt at the northern pole was during the heyday of Korsgaardianism in the Russian Empire in 1888, just prior to the Global War. Minor Russian noble and adventurer Karl Alexandrovich Kolchak attempted to force his way through in the summer of 1888 with a powerful ice-breaker steamship, the Svyatogor. While getting further than any other, the mighty expedition was eventually forced to turn back. Kolchak would later perish in the Global War while serving with the Russian Navy.
A few minor forays by Scandinavians had been made in the latter half of the 19th century, but the most successful was that of Brede Kjerstein whose airwhale expedition overflew the North Pole in 1897, capturing the first pictures of the pack ice over the boreal sea. Poor weather didn't allow for landing as Kjerstein had hoped, but the lessons learned from his expedition would be successfully applied to the conquest of the South Pole a few years later.
By the early 20th century, the Russians were in seclusion from the world, and the Scandinavian thirst for adventure had abated, leaving the field to the Americans. The first major attempt for the North Pole in the early 20th century was that by Gitchigumee's native son Nanuck du Nord, who as a young man in 1912 made his first foray towards the pole, trying to use sleds. It failed and du Nord barely made it back to civilization alive. He would have a long convalescence, but eventually when his health and fortunes allowed, he would once more heed the siren call of the Arctic Pole.
It took the pairing of an older, wiser, du Nord with the dashing Quebecker Nicolas Dezotell to finally conquer the Northern Pole. Dezotell was a dedicated aerialist, and was the first to overfly the Pole in an icewing. However he had determined that a more traditional airwhale would be necessary to take the Pole. Following the pattern set by the Antarctic expedition of Rowe, Dezotell combined forces with du Nord to use a combination of air, land, and sea transport to reach the treacherous North Pole and survive the journey to return to a heroes' welcome in 1935.
The territories that would become the 44th state of the union, Kisskachewan, had long been a reserve for the tribes who had inhabited them for centuries as well as die-hard tribesmen who were brought up from the southern United States.
However, the Northern Great Plains were perhaps always destined for a different history.
The story of how Kisskachewan would become a state starts in some ways with the well meaning missionary groups, the most prominent being the Catholics and the various Deist denominations. Among the good works these missionaries provided to the tribes in situ and those migrating from the south was vaccination against the scourge of smallpox. Even among the die-hards of the southern tribes, there were varying levels of resistance of "white mans' ways" with the more moderate among them (often family who felt obligated to travel with their more extremist loved ones) accepting the medical assistance of the missionaries.
While the Legion of America, charged with escorting the recalcitrant tribesmen north, had early on required vaccination of the Legionnaires, smallpox still managed to find its way amongst the tribes of the north, disproportionately decimating die-hard natives while leaving the inoculated relatively unscathed. There was also attrition from internecine warfare between rival bands of lodges.
Even though they did not join the initial wave of transports, many native relatives of tribesmembers in the north who had assimilated voluntarily with American society, either still in the lands of their birth or in Gitchigumee and later Winnipeg, would around the turn of the century begin to join their relatives on the Great Northern Plains, bringing more conventional ranching and farming with them. As relatives they were not barred from going into the native territories. They brought with them affluence and more connections to the United States. Many were Francophones or Bilinguals (or even Trilinguals for those who retained the tongue of their ancestors). It was these Metis who often would lobby Congress to allow more liberal entry into territories.
All this paved the way for the development of pro-American factions in the Territories who would succeed in bringing Kisskachewan into the Union.
The Imperial British government was split in terms of their response to the Subcontinental Crisis. The more aggressive elements of the Conservative Party wanted full military intervention to bring the break-away India back into the Imperial fold. The progressive wing of the Liberal Party advocated allowing India the freedom to plot her own course. The scene on the subcontinent was tense, to say the least, and parliament saw many fights on the floor over the crisis. Eventually the British government struck out for a middle ground, demanding that the Sultan government enter into negotiations rather than just declaring a fait accompli, especially when it came to the great deal of British material in the country. The British began a waiting game with the Indians, refusing to relinquish British military outposts on the subcontinent, and launching an embargo against the Indians until they would come to the bargaining table.
However, the Sultan government would not be swayed so easily. They started their own quiet sieges around British strongholds, and obtained the pledge of several Malthusian governments in Europe and elsewhere to trade with the breakaway UNI state.
The governments who had embraced the Malthusian cause did more than just agree to trade with India, however. At the international congress of Malthusians, they declared their own trade sanctions against the British Empire until they respected their fellow Malthusians at the UNI.
The Malthusian International Community Declares Sanctions Against the British Empire
The Thuggie Suppression Act was the first piece of federal legislation to bar immigration for a whole race. Granted, the threat of Thuggie violence was sensationalized in the papers, by broadcast telephony, and kinee, and thus some welcomed this bold move to defend America from the threat. Perhaps Congress could be forgiven for believing the legislation would be welcomed throughout the land, but in some quarters there was a violent backlash against the breadth and depth of the law. Several Democrats opposed it on grounds that it was a violation of liberty and an overextension of Federal power. Powerful industrialist interests in the Federalist camp opposed the law because it cut into a potential pool of cheap labor, as many Hindoos had started migrating north to look for work in the mighty factories of America (perhaps hoping for a better reception then they had in the South, but often disappointed in this). Several court cases were filed almost immediately challenging the law. At first it was only the passionate (and perhaps the greedy) who rose in opposition, until one man made an impassioned plea to the nation.
Shush Raja had emigrated with his parents from the Dominion of Southern America as a child, a relative rarity at the time, and had grown up in Richmond, Virginia. He was the first Hindoo to graduate from the law school at the University of Virginia. Raja worked representing Hindoo immigrants in New York City against exploitation in the garment district when the Thuggie Suppression Act was passed. While he worked as a junior member on one of the pro bono teams suing in Federal District Court, he became frustrated with both the amount of bureaucracy that was a drag on the progress of the legal challenge, as well as the lack of general public outcry against the over-reaching legislation.
Raja organized marches throughout the cities of the United States to raise awareness of the unfair Thuggie Suppression Act. While that attracted some attention, it would take more to break through the fear and misunderstanding that faced the Hindoo community. The charismatic Raja took to broadcasting and kinee news reports to make impassioned speeches appealing to the best principles of America. Finally, he engaged in a hunger strike in front of the US Supreme Court, and this garnered true national attention. While the Court never admitted this, in short order the highest court in the land would hear the case against the Thuggie Suppression Act in 1935. The court could choose to uphold the law, strike it down in its entirety, or only certain sections. The Supremes chose to split the difference and strike down the immigration bar while still upholding the stiff penalties against Thuggieism. Even though it wasn't the legal team that Shush Raja belonged to who won the legal victory, most commentators credited the moral victory to Raja.
After this momentous moment in jurisprudence in America, Raja sojourned to the Dominion of Southern America to raise awareness of Hindoo prejudice in the land of his birth. It was here that, amazingly, another dramatic event was added to his story. While leading a march in the Dominion Capitol, Baton Rouge, a Thuggie assassin launched a lethal attack at the Hindoo Rights advocate. Raja's life and those of several of his followers was saved by the heroic sacrifice of Baton Rouge native Andrew Jackson Beauregard, who threw himself on assassin, felling him, but at the cost of his own life. Beauregard came from an old Planter family and many saw his sacrifice as a symbol for the whole nation.
Traditional Irish Jack O'Lantern from a turnip
Modern Jack O'Lantern from a Ghost Pumpkin
The tradition of Halloween has a complicated history, but most of its roots come from the traditions of Ireland and Scotland, but was refined in North America. In the United States of America, it was the Irish who were the first to promulgate the traditions, especially adopting the practice of carving the Jack O'Lantern from a turnip, instead using the larger and easier to carve ghost pumpkin. In the Dominion of Southern America, it was the Scots who promoted the holiday, especially the practice of children Guising and going to houses for Souling - begging for treats. An interesting social wrinkle in the DSA of the 19th and 20th century was that the costumes children wore obscured their color and it was considered a time in the South when it was even easier to overcome the barriers between peoples, if at least for a night.
In New Orleans there was a large Hispaniolan community who mixed the traditional Halloween customs with those of the Voodoo tradition of Baron Samdee, and he would become like a Father Christmas for Halloween, with the Halloween traditions spreading back to the Province of Hispaniola and Baron Samdee spreading first throughout the Dominion, and from there to other parts of the British Empire, the United States, and France (both through her close affiliation with Britain and the strong ties to the northern parts of the United States). Many schools would have Halloween Guise Parades on the day, and let children off All Hallows Day (November 1) to recover from their night of revelry (and sugar stupor). By the 1930s, children all over the world were celebrating the coming of Baron Samdee and Halloween, a holiday rivaling Christmas.
During the Global War, it was decided that Imperial London needed a dedicated Orca base. The Royal Army decided the ideal location would be to the south of the city in Croydon. Long transport link between London and the South, Croydon was also had an important history as a favorite retreat of the Archbishops of Canterbury.
After the Global War, the Croydon Flightbase in addition to serving as a peacetime base for the air defense of London, it also developed as a commercial and passenger hub for Air Whale flights throughout the British Isles, to the Continent, and even across the Atlantic to the Dominion of Southern America and USA.
While developed initially as a base for lighter-than-air flights, in the 20th century the Flightbase facilities were extended to provide heavier-than-air flight capability for ICEwings. While commercial flights tended to remain ligher-than-air, the Royal Army could see that the future of military aviation would belong to the ICEwing, and Croydon Flightbase by 1930 was a major part of the Empire's development of this capability.
By the beginning years of the 1930s, concern about food and population growth was an increasing theme globally.
The boom in growth of agriculture on the Great Plains of North America in the last part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th led to increasing soil erosion and the development of the "Black Blizzards" of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the DSA the hardest hit province was Arkansas due to the proliferation of cotton production to the western portion of the province. In the United States it was the states of Washington and Niobrara. Arkies would flock to Albion and Washingtonians to California as the crisis intensified.
The costs of food in many parts of the world skyrocketed by 1930, and several nations saw protests, even riots, over the increasing cost of food. Malthusian controlled nations enacted strict rationing (some argued excessive to the actual problem) and enacted laws to prohibit export of food to nations not adhering to Malthusian practices of population control.
The 1934 Olympics in Saint Petersburg was a lavish affair. The Tsar had ordered constructed a revolutionary stadium for the spectacle. Russia had recently found itself flush on funds with the dual drivers of the Oil revenues from the Baku fields and the increasing price fetched by the products of the fecund fields of the Rodina. The big controversy going into the event was the British Empire failed to pressure the Olympics to have the breakaway UNI banned from the event as a competing nation. Despite international tensions, the leaders of the world, including the crowned heads of Europe, came to attend the Opening Ceremonies. While the Opening Ceremonies were an awe inspiring event captured by kinee, the Closing Ceremonies promised to be even greater!
The world was stunned when on Friday, August 3, 1934 the Olympic Stadium in Saint Petersburg, Russia was rocked by explosions and gunfire as a suicide squad of Thuggie assassins attacked the section of the stadium reserved for foreign dignitaries, killing and wounding several prominent statesmen and royal figures, with the most prominent death by far being that of British Emperor Alexander I. The Russian Tsarevitch was wounded in the attack as well. News services from around the world played the Kinee recordings of the attack.
While none of the Thuggie assassins were taken alive, their leader Kala Phansigar claimed credit for the attack, and explicitly stated that the "oppressive and overpopulating" British Emperor was the key target of the attack. At least one of the attackers had entered the stadium under the guise of a United Nationalities of India diplomat. In the weeks after the attack, both British and Russian intelligence came to believe that Kala Phansigar had planned and was still hiding in UNI. While Tipu Sultan's government officially expressed regret at the attack, the announcement was worded such that many political analysts took it as a back-handed condemnation of British policy. Sultan's UNI government also refused to allow investigators into the country, seen by the British and Russians as tacit shielding of Phansigar and the Thuggies (adding to suspicions several had that the UNI was using the Thuggie as a covert tool).
Ishan Sharma, ringleader of the Saint Petersburg Slaughter, and his fellow assassins:
The early 1930s saw the rise of more and more nations to the Malthusian cause as fears of a global catastrophe drove politicians to embrace the philophophies of the Malthusian clubs of the teens and twenties.
In the Far East, the United States of China saw a moderate pro-Malthusian government take power, though they found themselves criticized by their large neighbors Chuen China and the United Nationalities of India for doing too little to stem the growth in population in the southern Chinese nation.
In the New World, after the purge of Korsgaardists from Mexico in the aftermath of the Global War, more liberal politicians were in control, but by 1930 concern over the explosion of the Mexican population led Mexico to adopt some of the most rigorous Malthusian policies in the New World, only rivaled by the Malthusian regime in Brazil. Other Western Hemisphere nations to embrace Malthusian principles (to greater or lesser extent) were New Granada and the Confederation of the Equator, though perhaps without as much fervor as their more populous compatriots in the New World.
In Europe and Asia Minor, where the smaller nations of Belgique and the Netherlands had led, the larger powers would follow. While not populous, the lack of good arable land in Scandanavia and Switzerland led to concern about overpopulation on the global stage, which in turn would endanger their own nations which were heavily reliant on food importation. The large growth in the populations of the Great Britain, France, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire after the Global War led to growth in the Malthusian clubs in those nations. While seeing less population growth, strong Malthusian political clubs formed in Spain, Italy, Naples, Sicily, and Hungary as well. Many of these nations would see in the 1920s and early 1930s governments join the Malthusian cause, or the arising of new governments founded on Malthusian principles.
When the Subcontinental Crisis suddenly grew exponentially worse with the Saint Petersburg Slaughter at the 1934 Olympics, the emergency session of the International Malthusian Conference was the largest ever assemblage, with many of the attendees representing the governments in power in their respective nations.
Site of the 1934 Emergency Session of International Malthusianism during a break - while in formal session it was standing room only, even for heads of state!
The Liberal Party in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was born from the roots of the Whig Party and the Radicals and took center stage during the Reform Revolution. It vied with the Conservative Party (the Tories, ironically "tory" derived from the Irish term for outlaw, Tóraidhe) throughout the 19th and early 20th century for leadership of the British Empire.
Thomas Malthus was an important early influence on Liberalism, but his contributions fell out of favor relatively rapidly in the 19th century. It was not until the dawn of the 20th century that he was rediscovered and some of the earliest of the Malthusian Clubs were founded in the UK and the Malthusians became a powerful influence in the Liberal Party of the United Kingdom, though a majority of the Liberal Party was not as pessimistic about the threat of global overpopulation - many of them relied on the continued promise of the British Dominions such as Southern America and the Australias as options for settlement of excess population.
The Liberal Party was in power at the onset of the Subcontinental Crisis, which threatened to tear in twain between its Majority and Malthusian branches. They government's paralysis led to the stalemate between the British Empire and the breakaway Malthusian-led United Nationalities of India.
That paralysis was shattered by the Saint Petersburg Slaughter. The new King-Emperor, Alexander II, accepted the resignation of the Prime Minister after the no confidence vote in Parliament, and invited the leader of the Conservatives, Edward Thomas, to form a government. The Malthusian leadership in Parliament found themselves ostracized as the new PM formed a national unity government with Conservatives and other several Liberals who had been more outspoken critics of both the Malthusians and their own leadership's kowtowing to their demands.
Prime Minister Thomas' government declared war on the Thuggies AND the United Nationalities of India within 24 hours of its formation.
Antiquity knew of 7 classical planets; the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, & Saturn. Developments in astronomy and the heliocentric model took away two of those, the Sun and the Moon, and added the Earth as a planet when it had never been recognized as such before, but it wouldn't be until the end of the 18th century that science would begin to add to the list of planets.
William Herschel the great observational astronomer was the first to identify "the seventh" planet in the heavens in the 1780s, though initially he thought it might be a comet. Sir William felt that it was important to mark the times of such findings in the name, and suggested to name the new planet after his sovereign, King George III, calling it the 'Georgian star' or 'Georgium Sidus' in Latin. This name was not popular outside England, however. Other astronomers suggested naming the planet Herschel in honour of its discoverer. Scandinavian astronomer Erik Prosperin proposed the name Neptune, which was supported by other astronomers who liked the idea to commemorate the victories of the British Royal Naval fleet in the course of the American Revolutionary War by calling the new planet even Neptune George III or Neptune Great Britain. Renowned astronomer Johann Elert Bode proffered Uranus the Latinized version of the Greek god of the sky, Ouranos. Bode's Royal Academy colleague Martin Klaproth named his newly discovered element uranium in support of Bode's choice. Despite this, by the beginning of the 19th century Neptune had emerged as the leading candidate for the name of the planet, and became universal in the mid 1800s when HM Nautical Almanac Office, the final holdout, switched from using Georgium Sidus to Neptune. Herschel and others in the intervening decades had continued to study telescopically Neptune, discovering four moons around the new world. Taking the lead from the Aquatic name of the planet they revolved about, these moons were named Triton, Thetis, Nereus, and Doris.
Planet Neptune
In studying the reported orbit of Neptune the gentleman astronomer and polymath Ruben Cobos from the DSA Province of New Mexico discovered that the observed orbit would only make sense mathematically if there were a similar sized mass beyond Neptune. Based on his calculations astronomers in London found yet another new planet, a near twin to Neptune, which quickly acquired the name of Minerva. Therefore it was only natural that when a substantial sized moon was discovered in short order orbiting Minerva, that the moon would be named after the owl of the goddess Minerva, Nyctimene.
Planet Minerva
By the 1870s more moons had been discovered, this time closer to Earth, when the two moons of venerable Mars were discovered. Jonathan Swift and Voltaire had postulated two moons around Mars in prior centuries and their discovery seemed to make those literary luminaries prescient. The astronomer who discovered them was a citizen of the Roman Republic, and decided to name them after the twin sons of Mars who were the legendary founders of ancient Rome, Romulus and Remus (of course, the larger of the two received the name Romulus).
Romulus & Remus:
The Moons of Mars
It was recognized by the late 19th century that Minerva didn't completely account for the perturbations of Neptune's predicted orbit. Indeed Minerva's own orbit suggested another mass further out in space. Thus the search was on once more for a new planet, this time beyond the planet Minerva. In 1934 a possible candidate was found by American Victoria Saigh, whose family had immigrated to the USA from the Ottoman Empire after the Global War. She named her discovery after the Roman goddess Juno.
Planet Juno
Shortly after the declaration of war against the United Nationalities of India, in London the crowned heads of Europe gathered for the Royal Funeral of fallen British Emperor Alexander the First. Meanwhile, the emergency session of the International Malthusian Congress was continuing in Amsterdam.
The Malthusians issued what amounted to a declaration of solidarity with the UNI and other pro-Malthusian governments, declared themselves against the British war (though by this time Russia had joined the British Empire in declaring UNI an outlaw state harboring Thuggies). They did pay lip service against the extremes of Thuggism, but noted it was a symptom of the overpopulated earth and their belief that the only by strict action to control the population could such unfortunate events be avoided in future. The Malthusian manifesto from the congress stated that all nations had a duty to curb the rising population, and that they would stand together with all states who embraced the cause, and stand against all those that didn't join them in the fight against overpopulation. To the Malthusians, war held no fear, for the population one way or another had to be curbed, lest the whole world face utter collapse.
Chair of the Emergency Session of the International Malthusian Congress declaring the Multinational Malthusian Manifesto
While many governments with strong Malthusian leanings reiterated their support of the Manifesto in the days and weeks to come, not all did, or at least not without regime change or internecine fighting. The two most dramatic examples being the Empires of France and Germany. While both had strongly leaning Malthusian governments, their royal families with deep ties to the British crown would have resisted such moves - the timing of their declaration of solidarity with the Malthusian cause while the royal families were out of those nations was no mistake. While in France this led to the declaration of the Second Republic of France, in Germany it led to outbreak of the German Civil War.
The coup d'état in France had been long in the making and facilitated by the French Empire's centralized government, the inheritance of Bonaparte. While the elderly French Emperor found Malthusianism distasteful, the movement had been growing in popularity throughout the more progressive regions of France, and especially in the capitol of Paris. Having no real choice but to accept a pro-Malthusian Prime Minister, the honourable Alexandre Sartre, son of a prominent French naval admiral, the Emperor still had sought to act as a check against the more extreme tendencies of the French Malthusians. However, the forces of change seeking to prevent the horrors of a population crash had plotted for the time when those who sought to prevent a global crash would have to fight against the reactionary forces of the old order that refused to make the hard choices to save the world and humanity.
The time to strike was when the royals of the continent were pre-occupied with burying one of their own in London. In France, the military, especially the Navy through Sartre family connections, had been suborned and supported the declaration of the Second French Republic under Provisional President Sartre. While similar plans had been laid for the Empire of Germany, in part due to the more decentralized nature of that nation, the plans had not gone quite according to plan, and Germany was in turmoil. While not all that the International community of Malthusian leaders had hoped for, it still at least for the short term neutralized German involvement in the early days of the Population War.
The French Navy had for many decades worked with and trained with the British Royal Navy, as had most of the French military services. However, the British Royal Navy had always been seen as the more senior partner, unlike the more equal footing of the other services between the two nations, and the French Navy had something of an envious rivalry with their British counterparts. So there was a sort of perverse relishing of taking their intimate knowledge of the Royal Navy and using it to their advantage. Ironically, this involved using not classic naval power, but some of the newest weapons in the French armamentarium, the military ICEwing. Thus early on the morning of August 10, 1934, known forever after as Black Friday, the combined ICEwing forces launched from ICEwing carriers and coastal ICEwing fields from Spain, France, Belgique, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia under the leadership of the French Navy launched combined air strikes on Royal Navy dockyards in Great Britain and Ireland, decimating the home fleet of the British Empire.
Electricity had been a hot topic of scientific discovery even before American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin first flew his kite in a lightning storm. There had been a debate as to whether there were two types of electricity or one type (or fluid as it was thought to be at the time) and Franklin subscribed to the one fluid theory, and called electrical charge from a paucity of the fluid negative, and charge from an excess of fluid positive. These terms promulgated through the Enlightenment scientific community and have remained to the modern day. A near contemporary of Franklin's, John Dalton later was the first to come up with the modern concept of elements being made up of indivisible particles for which he resurrected the term atom.
Ben Franklin & John Dalton
As the 19th century progressed, it became more and more likely that there was an atom of electricity, and by the late 19th century it had come to be believed that it was in fact the negative charge that represented the presence of the atom of electricity, and was named the negatom (a contraction of negative atom). By the turn of the century it also became apparent that there was a positive atom of electricity, suspected to be equivalent to the center of hydrogen, for which the term posatom was coined. It was subsequently postulated that elemental atoms (called elatoms) were not in fact indivisable, in a sense, but rather composed of a combination of negatoms and posatoms. By the early 20th century it was demonstrated by bombarding elatoms with high energy particles carrying a positive charge and equivalent to a solium elatom sans its usual allotment of negatoms, that in fact elatoms were composed of an outer layer of negatoms, and that the middle of the atom, termed the centrum, contained the posatoms. The period between the Global War and the Population War saw a flowering of the sciences in the modern world, and as researchers continued to experiment on the nature of the particles composing the elatom, it grew increasingly likely that there was a third particle, one that didn't carry electricity, but just as massive as the posatom, that was also present in the centrum of the elatom. As it was electrically neutral it was posited that this particle might be a combination of negatom and posatom, which led to the coining of the term sumatom. It was shortly after the onset of the Population War that finally the existence of the sumatom was confirmed.
An Elatom of Solium demonstrating the
Negatom Shell and Centrum containing
two Posatoms and two Sumatoms:
The Home Islands of the British Empire experienced the first months of the Population War primarily as a campaign between ICEwings. The forces of Malthusianism had struck a cruel but not fatal blow with their incredible surpise attack of Black Friday. However, they had failed to destroy all the Home Fleet, and the shipyards of the Empire, especially in the Dominion of Southern America, would soon turn out replacements for those lost, as well as helping to provide even more needed seamen for those new ships. But that would take time, and even so, the Population War would prove decisively that it was airpower, not seapower, that was the vital element for strategic success. The Malthusian forces had targeted some air targets on Black Friday, but mostly in support of their attacks on the ports of the Home Fleet. It was a surprising oversight given their own innovative use of airpower.
Great Britain and Ireland would trade blows with the European forces of the Channel and North Sea in those first several months, with waves of ICEwings from one side then another trying to knock the other out of the War. Neither force could gain enough air superiority over the other to chance a crossing with their ships, something that was made painfully obvious for any ships that tried their chances in the watery charnal house the Channel became.
Prime Minister Edward Thomas would turn to the master of Croyden Airfield, Sir Thomas Black, to serve as his Air Marshal for the duration of the Population War.
One place in Europe where early on a traditional war-front developed was between British ally Portugal and Spain, which had joined the Malthusian cause. The British (and the officially neutral Americans and her allies, Morocco) kept the Portuguese well supplied, and British Imperial forces flowed into Portugal in preparation for the Invasion of Spain and relief of Gibraltar.
On the Indian Front in the first several months of the Population War, the staring contest that had existed since Sultan had declared the UNI became a ferociously fought siege, especially in Bombay. However, the British were able to reinforce by sea and even with the large manpower the UNI Army was willing to send, they simply didn't have the firepower to dislodge the British forces nor stop their resupply. On the other hand, the British had no opportunity at that point to break out of their strongpoints on the coast. Again the first year of the Population War seemed mired in a stalemate.
The younger generation of Mexican leaders had grown up immersed in the stories of their fathers' fight against the Korsgaardian Mexican Empire, and as a result most of the Mexican leadership had rejected conservativism embracing more liberal values. However, the population boom, especially in the States around the capitol of Mexico City, gave birth to a strong Malthusian movement in Mexico. By the 1930s, the government had gone over to the Malthusian Cause, and declared war against the British Empire in August 1934 along with many other Malthusian nations.
What the young generation had miscalculated was the reaction of their fathers, men who had lived in exile or underground until, aided by the Southrons of the Dominion, had retaken their nation from the Korsgaardist scourge. These men of honor remembered the ties of blood and honor with the British Empire, and many led once more resistance of injustice. Known in Spanish as Los Padres de la Libertad (The Fathers of Liberty) by their supporters, or derisively as Las Abuelitas Viejas (The Little Old Grandmothers) by their enemies, these veterans of the Global War were strongest in the northern States of Mexico which declared their refusal of Mexico City's call to war.
Los Padres de la Libertad
In the South of Mexico, the Moskitos, long time allies of the British, fed up with the wars of Mexico, declared their independence from the Malthusian Government and seized the transoceanic canal in their region which was quickly reinforced by the Dominion.
It is believed that anti-Malthusian activist Maggie May Thatcher was the first to propose a holiday honoring mothers, but it was Pennsylvanian Roseanne Dell who would 'give birth' to official holiday. Roseanne was part of the wealthy Dell family, founders of DFP Oil, the largest American oil company, and placed her family's financial and political connections behind the effort to make Mother's Day a reality. Very close to her own mother, she began holding memorials in her honor on her birthdate, May 8th. By 1930, many US states had recognized the holiday and it had been avidly picked up in the provinces of the Dominion. In 1933, President Martin Roosevelt proclaimed May 8th a national holiday honoring mothers, as would the Dominion of Southern America's Prime Minister Robert Perkins in the same year. Seen as a strong counter to Malthusianism, Imperial Prime Minister Edward Thomas declared that Mother's Day would be celebrated on May 8th throughout the British Empire, Maggie May Thatcher by his side, and with the first empire-wide celebration of the holiday being May 8th, 1935 - a small light of love in the darkest days of the Population War.
With northern Mexico and the Moskito in rebellion against the Malthusian federal government of Mexico, control of the canals of the United States of Mexico was interesting. The main canal at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec the Federales held, whereas the Moskitos and allies in the Mexican states of Nicaragua and Costa Rica held with assistance from Dominion forces. With the smallest canal in the state of Panama cut off from the rest of Mexico, it fell upon the federal government's Malthusian allies in New Granada to move into Panama to help secure this canal for the central Mexican government.
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