I wouldn’t exactly call crucifiction ‘icon worthy’. The practice was basically the most humiliating, painful and revolting way of executing criminals the Romans could imagine. The cross wasn’t an electric chair analog, it’s basically the equivalent of drowning someone in a used toilet bowl.
The...
Honestly, very likely they would be of limited use, maybe enough to scare horses. Still, it would be quickly copied by their rivals, just as they themselves had copied the Persian cataphracts.
Honestly, it would likely change a few details of individual battles, but would be unlikely to change...
A combination of economy, culture and religion. Slavery became uneconomical, and socially unacceptable. The story of abolition is long and complicated, with many books written on it, so you can just go and do some research.
So, if you want to get rid of slavery in an ancient society, you need...
Some had them ... often it was considered uncouth to mistreat them. But mostly it would be hard to enforce, and how dare you tell me what I can do with my own property?
Most would be confused, bewildered, at how you’d expect civilisation to function without disposable, chattel labour ... and are you gonna take away our property? That’s theft! Our businesses and estates rely on slaves ... what about my kids tutor? He’s been in the family for years! Hell...
You want to hire someone to fight to the death at your funeral? Other jobs are unpleasant, demeaning to free workers. Othersbwoukdnt be practical if you had to pay workers: silver or salt mining, for example, had huge death rates for workers: if you paid free men to do it, it would be too...
The issue was, anyone with a radio receiver could pick up Sputnik's beeping. Pretty hard to get millions of people to ignore that kind of concrete reality that they can independantly confirm.
This could be awesome. I was too young for the original series, but I caught up on DVD. BSG is full of classic sf tropes: the ragtag survivors, banding together to survive adversity, humanity showing its finest hour in the face of a terrible adversary, bridging gaps between communities, showing...
I think Turtledove kept him in the military in his CSA victory timeline ... never rose above sergeant, and was embaressing to his comrades for his blatently anti-semetic attitudes (I seem to recall his leutnant apologising for his manner when dealing with some US troops ...)
Interestingly, the POD you suggest was the canon POD for the Draka series: Fergusons breech loader led to the Revolution lasting longer, getting more brutal, and led to the mass exodus of British loyalists following the American victory. These exiles settled in Cape Town ... and things got...