Recent content by graymouser

Pretty much any scenario where Bush is assassinated after 9/11 and before the summer of 2005 (when antiwar sentiment started rebuilding, followed by Hurricane Katrina) would be the easiest POD. If the assassin is American, you have a recipe for intense domestic repression. If they're Muslim, you...

Have either Henry VIII's first son Henry survive, or switch Mary Tudor to another boy, and it's possible that you avoid the whole succession/divorce trouble and keep the English crown Catholic. Even if England later turns Protestant, it'd probably get rid of the entire Anglican style of worship.

Before the Civil War, if a person from the USA said "my country" they could well mean their state rather than the United States. "Emperor" also fits well with the Roman-style pretensions of a country that established a Senate and adopted an eagle as its symbol.

Ok. So: you've got a monarch in the USA, which should be George Washington. Whatever Washington did, it was going to stick. I think he has the following titles: - In the Commonwealth states, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, he is King of the state directly. The state is run by a...

As scenarios go, it was a 3-point game, any number of things could've changed the outcome. Even just a modestly better defensive performance would lead to an Eagles victory, so a healthy TO would've been able to switch it up. Even just assume he makes some dynamite play in the last few minutes...

Pro-Moscow Communists were hammered from two events in 1956: Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the 20th Congress of the CPSU, and his invasion to crush the Hungarian revolution later that year. It's what eventually gives Trotskyism the upper hand in British far-left politics and, with the policy...

Aozhouhuaren has one thing right - Malcolm was a marked men in many organizations and probably wouldn't have lived out the '60s in New York City. Unless a failed assassination brought down the hammer on Louis X/Farrakhan and the whole NOI, I don't see them stopping at one try. Maybe if he lived...

Best case scenario is that Russia limps along as a debt-crushed satellite of the western European powers, and manages to put down periodic worker and peasant uprisings without resorting to outright fascism. The forces of a democratic republic were extremely weak and had essentially discredited...

Yeah, the Ussuri River War is really quite bad. The author has China opening up a war with so many fronts you can't even count them (Ussuri River, Mongolia, North Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, India, Australia...) and then turns Mao into a weird expy of Hitler in the bunker. Strategy? Tactics...

Yeah, the Roman Empire seems like as good a place as any. Of course, "Black" was hardly a category in that period, but Mauretania took its name from the Greek "μαῦρος" which meant "black" or "dark." So...an emperor hailing from Mauretania would logically be black and on the throne well in...

The Spartakusbund actually had a fit of bad luck IOTL. If they had managed to avoid the "January uprising" then the Freikorps wouldn't have been able to kill Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and they could've had a somewhat better outcome later in the year. If you really want to give them a better...

The Roman Empire saw itself as imperium sine fine - an empire without limits or borders. Even if Julius Caesar had not conquered all of Gaul, Octavian or one of the subsequent emperors would have. The Empire was a tremendous machine with basically the sole purpose of extracting taxes from its...

The thing about Washington is that the cult of personality around him was one of the relatively few ties that bound the young United States together. Arguably it's one of the most effective in history, and it galvanizes a nation and creates the whole institution of the presidency. Without...

Trotsky never would've taken power in time to stop the failed October 1923 uprising in Germany - although the policy of the KPD would be different from 1925 or so onward. You'd see Trotsky probably intervening, politically or militarily, in the 1927 Shanghai commune, and maybe he'd be able to...

Really, if the Pennsylvania Dutch had been a more prominent community (with their own universities etc), German had become a semi-official second language in the US in 1794, and some immigration patterns were a bit different, you could've had it happen in the years after the Civil War. You just...