Recent content by FALightFighter

I think that the prosperity and stability of the 1960s-70s has been exaggerated by westerners who wanted some sort of hope post-2001. Mullah Zaeef talks in his bio about being internally displaced in the late 60s by tribal feuds, and having to move from Zabul (or maybe Ghazni, it's been a while...

Didn't the split between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodox only happen in 1054? Seems like the timeline is off somehow.

I don't think you'll get direct election of POTUS before direct election of senators, and that was 1913. Was it ever even floated, much less seriously proposed?

There's quite a bit of hyperbole going on in this thread. Not defending colonialism, but there are certainly gradations and variations that can be assessed. And genocide in Africa and India? Give me a break. There were certainly atrocities, some on a vast scale, but the intent was not, in most...

With the POD(s) that far back, you can do just about anything. A small change with Genghis Khan, and you have a whole different set of centralization in Russia, with no certainty that you end up with three, very closely related ethnicities in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian, for instance...

There are a pretty wide range of behaviors covered here that I think have a wide variety of disparate impacts. I mean there is a difference between getting tortured or raped by your parents and being pulled out of school after 6th grade to become a manual laborer, despite the fact that we...

I mean Gaul Latinized the Franks, and France Latinized the Normans pretty quickly. Even if a Norse elite somehow gains control of the French kingdom, what is the likelihood of them reversing that trend? I'd guess 10% or less, if one were able to run 1000 "iterations", certainly no more than 100...

Hadn't Vinland already been discovered and then pretty much abandoned when Harald had a shot at taking England in 1066?

In NY (so far upstate, I'm closer to Michigan than to NYC!), we had NYS history in elementary school and in junior high, at least in the 1980s. I remember learning about Champlain, Henry Hudson, the Iroquois Confederacy (not colonial, but still the period), Peter Stuyvesant (sp?) and New...

@ReachODST , I think you've confused Britain with the British Empire, which might be related to the exact lack of nuance that @Father Maryland is talking about.

And, hoping to get a little more common language into the mix, I googled the most popular literary passages: From Pride and Prejudice: English It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Danish Det er en alment anerkendt...

Written isn't everything, but: Danish Sig, at skandinavismbevægelsen har succes i det 19. århundrede, hvor Danmark og Sverige-Norge danner en enkelt nation. Ville svensk, norsk og dansk i et sådant tilfælde betragtes som et enkelt nordisk sprog? Norwegian La oss si at skandinavismebevegelsen...

I think we have some cases of lacking understanding how warfare worked in the past, skewed by the professional armies of the recent past. Prior to the very, VERY late 1600s, armies were mostly mercenary and not professional and disciplined- see Germany during the 30 Years War. The idea of...

The changes from Napoleonic to 1860s/70s were not that significant in practical application. Your logistics train isn't going to support that much greater ammunition consumption, even though the weapons are theoretically capable of it. Simply more wagons or pack animals (which are far less...

Check out "How to Hide an Empire", by Daniel Immerwahr. We have a very mainland-centric collective narrative/memory of US history. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374172145/howtohideanempire