Recent content by KEVP

Strangely enough, I have been thinking about the original SNL recently. My feeling is that SNL was the culmination of an important trend that was happening in Western entertainment. A new style of comedy that relied more on what tends to be called "improvisation". This was the style of the...

Here's the problem. Originally, there doesn't seem to be that much difference between the various Germanic cultures in Britain. Their Celtic-speaking neighbors call them all "Saxons", as they do to this day. But the Germanics all thought of themselves as "Angle-kin" and called their language...

Are you aware that the "popular culture" of England identifies itself as "Saxon"? The language spoken by the overwhelming majority of inhabitants of England is "English" which is a descendent of the language of the "Saxons" (yes, with some other elements, but the "skeleton" of the language, and...

Remember that the term Corporation dates back to medieval law. In those days, a "Corporation" might be a city government (there are still some old cities whose governments are called "corporations"), a monastery, or a university. The basic idea was that one individual member would not be...

The battle for women's suffrage and for Prohibition were closely entwined. Prohibition was very much a feminist issue. Typically, Dad would get his pay packet on Friday (and in those days, this typically meant an envelope with cash in it--not a check like today). Then Dad would go to the...

This question has also come up in another thread. I think organized crime would still exist, because it did exist before Prohibition. Without Prohibition it just wouldn't be so powerful or, umm, organized. A lot of people's lives would be different, Al Capone is only one. Capone was...

The point is that alcohol is a central accepted part of our culture. It has long been accepted, even expected, for alcohol to be drunk at certain social and other events. Marijuana has NEVER had that level of cultural acceptance. It was never "normal" or "typical" for an average American to...

The question of "who got to vote" in those days was NOT in the hands of the President and/or Federal Congress, it was in the hands of each individual state. It was only after the Civil War that the Federal Government, in the 14th Amendment, gained the right to intervene in a state to secure...

I think this is just too much like an OTL map to have a POD of 1776.

Despite what you may have heard, human beings are not that creative or inventive. Occasionally an inventor comes along, and invents something that AFTER IT IS INVENTED seems obvious. But nobody thought of it before. It is very rare for the same invention to be invented twice independently...

A better standing in the primaries is indeed the start. I think he was a real contender in 1988 until Super Tuesday. There were a lot of scandals in 1988, if there had been a scandal involving Dukakis, that would have reduced his support and probably swapped some votes over to Simon. Also...

I tend to agree that the "big things" like Earthquakes and Volcanoes aren't going to be affected by the Butterfly effect (short of some sort of supertechnology). Another one is meteor impacts. It seems that, for example, the 1908 Tunguska impact will have to happen on schedule in just about...

Even if fragments of history remain in a legend, it gets mixed with folkloric and mythical elements, together with history that belongs to a different period. For example, a lot of young Americans believe (this is shown by surveys) that the Soviet Union was the enemy of the United States in...

I think it is an interesting idea. Hitler would not have had the idea to become active in politics before being assigned to spy on the DAP. It was when he started attending meetings of this party that he had the idea to get a leadership position and build the party into something stronger...

I think this is a possibility. There were folks like Abraham Lincoln who did not drink but still did not support prohibition. Without Prohibition, the alliance of organized crime groups that we usually call "The Mafia" would not have become so powerful in the U.S. Also cultural changes like...