A war veteran with a major injury is probably your best bet. Making thinly-veiled insinuations about the fitness of a disabled person for the office would be a lot harder to do against a veteran. Maybe Joe Kennedy survives the mission that killed him OTL with a missing limb or two and later runs...
A Nationalist China that stays non-aligned in the Cold War is a good bet. It would be far more open to Western investment than OTL China, and it'll be able to avoid the worst of Mao's excesses like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. It'll still be a corrupt, brutal dictatorship...
Honestly, I don't think his books would change that much. It's hard to imagine someone like GRRM going into Vietnam and coming out with a more positive view of war. ASOIAF already has a lot of brutal depictions of the dark side of war; this might be more emphasized, but it shouldn't change much.
Standards of beauty tend to follow class lines. Anything that makes you look wealthier or higher-class ends up as beautiful. That's how you get things like foot-binding in China; anyone who has that done clearly has never done hard labor in their life, and thus is wealthy enough to not have to...
I guess the general breaking down of the Westphalian system means that international organizations face fewer barriers, and sports benefited from that. I'd be interested if there was some kind of merger of American and Canadian football.
Moving a team to Baltimore after 1984 would be a good move. The CFL team that was established in 1993 managed to do very well, drawing crowds upwards of 30,000.
The Chinese, especially the Nationalists, saw the war against Japan as a continuation of constant Japanese attempts to conquer China going back fifty years. In addition, they had substantial support from the US, even before Pearl Harbor. With the promise of US aid to defeat Japan, all they had...
I think Belarusians were seen as Russians in the period. The area had a distinct history and dialect, but the people thought of themselves as Russians. I could definitely see the Germans or Poles or both try to promote a separate "White Russian" identity to divide them from the Russians.
Oh come on, you mention that entire defense and not a single mention of Sexy Rexy Grossman? He's the best Ravens QB of all time (not that that's saying much, granted).
The Lions passing on Calvin Johnson and Adrian Peterson in favor of Jamarcus Russel was hilarious in hindsight. Some of the...
Excellent update, great to see this back. I tend to agree with Stevens that this kind of power is just begging to be abused by the government. I'm looking forward to seeing what Kearny does in Europe. Based on his pro-French tendencies and Bismarck's statement, he's going to do something for...