I just finished up a month of work on my last big project, a world map for my next timeline, Boll Weevil Blues, in 1918. Keep in mind that the following lore summary is just that, a summary, and that while certain points may seem strange or unrealistic, I've put a lot of thought into them, and that there's just too much to put here. With that said, here's the lore: The Boll Weevil arrives in the US South 20 years early in 1863, completely collapsing the Confederate cotton economy and destroying the plantation aristocracy virtually overnight, leading to several slave revolts. After the war, the leaders of many of these slave revolts are put into power as Republican leaders during the military occupation of the South. Lincoln is also never assassinated, and Radical Republicans manage to get him to sign off on the 50% loyalty oath plan after some fierce negotiations. After Lincoln's third term (which he is elected to) ends in 1872, Charles Sumner is elected president for two terms, continuing the reconstruction of the south, and rooting out the KKK and Black Codes, as well as ratifying a 16th "Civil Rights Amendment". This allows Reconstruction to successfully redistribute the land to the freedmen and attain racial equality a century early, instead of regressing into segregation and sharecropping. The Democratic Party also basically dies due to lack of support from Southern plantation owners, and is replaced by the Nationalist Party, who are supported by Western business lobbies and what southern racists there are left. The Nationalists under John Neely Johnson of California win the presidency in 1880, taking power for a single term, full of incompetence and corruption. Johnson finally pulls the military out of the South, but by this point the land is in the hand of smallholders, and the black electorate controls the southern electoral college. In the wake of this corruption-riddled term, a new party, the Proclamation Party, forms in the South, uniting poor blacks and whites together against the influence of big business, with Frederick Douglass at its head. Frederick Douglass wins in a landslide in 1884, and thanks to his control of the Southern electoral college, successful reforms against trusts and monopolies, and an alternate war with Spain which liberates Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as independent republics, he wins a whopping four terms, until his death in 1897, when he is replaced by James Baird Weaver until 1900. This all, of course, quickly butterflies to the rest of the world, namely German unification and the Scramble for Africa. The Austro-Prussian War doesn't happen, so the German Confederation stays around and Napoleon III is still in power until the 1880s, when he's overthrown by a left-wing republic that alienates Britain and allies with a constitutional monarchy in Russia and a similar to our timeline Italy. Britain in turn allies with Prussia and Austria, bringing the German Confederation onto their side, and when the Conflagration, this timeline's World War One, starts after an incident in the English Channel in 1907, these powers go to war. In the end France and Russia, along with the US (who now have gone on a staunchly anti-imperialist path thanks to the presidency of Frederick Douglass and the alternate war with Spain) win, and the German Confederation goes into chaos, eventually settling into a few states, mostly under Prussia and Austria, along with concessions to France and Russia. Britain also gets a pretty bloody nose and loses Canada to the US in the peace deal, and is forced to make India and Ireland into Dominions after a wave of riots. Other changes include China having a relatively bloodless revolution in the 1890s and becoming a poor but stable republic, Indonesia (Nusantara) becoming independent earlier on due to international arbitration, and Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia losing a four-year war with Argentina in the 1880s. Colonialism in Africa, while still present, also never really carves up the interior of the continent in a chaotic scramble, since anti-colonial voices are louder and the Congo Free State never exists.
https://imgur.com/4c8iuG3 (It's too big to embed so here's an Imgur link.)
