Recent content by Passepartout

I see two things happening here. As CerebralError notes, Stalin was more focused on Russian communism, so it would probably not spread as rapidly as in real life. I see maybe the 1980s instead of the historical timeframe. On the other hand, Trotsky's expansionism policy was, as we all know, very...

I don't have a citation handy but I'm pretty sure I've seen sources saying that 'thou' was already in decline in the period when Quakerism arose. Pronoun use among Quakers may have had some influence but it probably still would have disappeared even if there wasn't a religious sect which...

Malcolm X did move away from the Nation of Islam and towards Sunni Islam if I remember correctly, so he's probably the best choice for propaganda if your goal is to recruit black people and your constraint is that you are trying to endorse Wahhabism.

This is all reasonable. I was having trouble justifying the Maritimes (for some reason I couldn't remember the name Maritimes so I switched to Atlantic) and prairies being independent, but was entertained by the idea, so I went with it. Most of my previous post was off the top of my head...

Or a similar idea from the opposite direction - Canada suffers more from the Great Depression and after labor riots in Quebec and the prairie provinces, there is a fascist coup in 1935. Since this is CANADA and not Spain, it gets a reaction from the United States which sends in the troops to...

James Clerk Maxwell gets mad about widespread adoption of the Rankine scale, in light of Rankine's initial opposition to Maxwell's theories. They wage a war of words for a few months in leading publications, scientific and otherwise, and this becomes good material for a paragraph long blurb in...

Yes, sorry if I wasn't clear, I meant to say that we would probably do so to an even greater extent.

It doesn't really matter. I mean, as my grandmother said upon leaving a theater that was playing Hamlet, it's all just a bunch of famous quotes strung together. :D The English speaking world will have to turn to the allo-King James Bible (I expect minimal difference in terms of a Bible...

Not really. Creoles are a well-studied phenomenon, and English doesn't really fit a lot of the characteristics of a creole. It does have substantial borrowing from French, but borrowing of words does not a creole make. English grammar shows enough continuity from pre-Norman to post-Norman times...

I'm going to go with India also. A billion people or thereabouts, several religions, one of which is quite diverse in and of itself, a multitude of languages from multiple linguistic families, and if we are counting Germans and Hungarians as different in a surviving Habsburg state, well...

I knew I should have thrown that word in when I brought them up! I was thinking about Crime and Punishment as I wrote it. Raskolnikov and whatnot.

Ah, okay. Zed, to elaborate on what Dan says, Peter the Great decided that the Orthodox church needed reforming along with all the other things he got himself up to, and as you can imagine, people got annoyed when he started enforcing changes. I heard them compared to people who dislike...

Isn't there a population of Old Believers up there? We were talking about them in my Russian Literature class last semester.

I'm sure the Metis would have liked a different outcome, which is ultimately where I was getting at.

Pretty much what he says. :)