A lot of that is a result of Detroit's decline. As far as I know, its area is about right for the population it had 50 years ago. The city proper famously has a ton of abandoned buildings and vacant lots that used to be people's homes.
I doubt the CSA would limit immigration strictly to Northern European Protestants. In fact, I think @Paragon's point about relative tolerance of Jews would apply to Catholics as well. When it comes to policies regarding Catholics, you also have to consider the increased prominence of Louisiana...
Not too even. According to those numbers, 62% of the Californio population was south of the Grapevine. It's worth mentioning though that there isn't a single citation for those numbers, so for all we know they could've been pulled out of thin air by some random Wikipedia editor.
That said, I...
Interesting, I had no idea.
As long as you have enough settlers in the Sacramento area, it's just a matter of time. IOTL there weren't really any nonnative settlements in the Gold Country until after they found gold. You just need people in the nearby parts of the Central Valley to recognize...
There isn't any gold in the Bay Area. The nearest part of the Gold Country is a good 120 miles east of San Francisco, on the other side of the Central Valley.
Why Catalan?
Franklin J. Cranston is the perfect candidate for what you're asking.
As far as I know, there's no such person IOTL. However, with a POD in the first half of the 1800s, there's no reason for mid-20th century politicians to be drawn from the set of actually existing people, let alone people who...
Only @Alias_The_J could say for sure, but I have some ideas:
1.) Reagan is widely associated with the War on Drugs. Nixon started it, but Reagan amped it up and made it a higher priority than his immediate predecessors.
2.) Allegations of CIA involvement in cocaine trafficking, which in more...
Cocaine already has that effect, so that won't do much.
Kinda, but that wasn't an attempt to poison drug users. Paraquat is an herbicide, they were trying to kill the marijuana before it could be harvested in the first place.
Beverly Hills is basically a neighborhood in LA that happens to have its own mayor and city council. New Orleans is an entire city. I don't see the two being anything alike.
Now, some particular neighborhood in New Orleans could certainly be the Beverly Hills of the country. But not the whole...
Your understanding is correct. The actual numbers, from the 1860 census:
SC: 58.6% black
MS: 55.3% black
LA: 49.5% black
AL: 45.4% black
GA: 44.0% black
Florida was actually slightly blacker than Georgia, at 44.6%. Combined, the five states OP specified would've been 49.8% black, and crept up...
Yeah, I was unsure about posting that. I wrote the sentence with Kansas in mind (particularly the "any influence whatsoever" part), then added Idaho as an afterthought. With Idaho I was thinking in terms of direct influence, not whether there would be any knock-off effects at all.
What tribe in the northeast? They're all rice farmers, the nearest hunter-gatherers live in the interior of the Malay Peninsula.
As for the French philosopher angle, that's certainly something Pol Pot could do. People like that exist, but they hang out in anarchist bookstores or live off the...