alternatehistory.com

This one is two cultural updates rolled into one, because neither of them were long enough to make separate posts.
The Great European War was one of the most impactful events to ever change the landscape of the world of art, and whether it's impact was positive or negative is a debate which will probably never find an end.

In the beginning of the 20th century, art, literature and music were still struggling to leave the confines of 19th century movements and evolve into something new. There were some ideas floating around, the most famous of them being the Lithuanian Ispudia Movement, but even it rose and vanished like the rest. Unlike the Romanticists and the Realists of the past, the new generation of writers, poets and painters found it hard to find a new niche for them to fulfill, an idea or a method of expression to rally around, much like the Romanticists called for national awakening and the Realists campaigned against social problems - and this is why many congratulated the beginning of the Great European War as a way to break the monotony of the recent years. However, this was where artistry split. Some, enamored by propaganda, national feelings and patriotism, stood in favor of the war, while others, understanding the pain and horror of conflict, were firmly against it.

While millions of soldiers fought in the front lines with bullets and shells, thousands of artists entered battle back home with pens and brushes, in "battles" almost as fierce as the offensives on the Western Front. Opposing other movements and exemplifying that in your work was not only seen as preferable, but as a necessity. Many names were proposed for this period in art history - Proto-Avantgardism, the Armageddon, Disaster Art - but the term that eventually stuck was Militaristic Art.

Paintings and novels from this period began to more resemble propaganda pieces rather than unique works, regurgitating the same straw man arguments and logic leaps over and over. The pro-war artistry depicted the pacifist movement as decadent and weak, while the anti-war artistry presented the warmongers as fools and murderers who only wish to see the world burn. State propaganda kept adding fuel to the fire, while the revolutions which took place during the war made the conflict multi-faceted and introduced ideological lines to further divide the sides. The pacifists mostly aligned with Unitarianism, while the warmongers usually represented supporters of traditional ideologies like Protectionism and Republicanism.

The Paris Peace Accords did not end the period of Militaristic Art, and even though the soldiers were returning home, the artists were still fighting their war. A war which was constantly mutating, to the point where in the early 1920s, it was barely impossible for a bystander not initiated in the history of the "conflict" to tell why these famous writers, poets, musicians and painters are insulting each other, constantly making works targeted against each other and fiercely debating events which had ended years ago. Obviously, this situation was unsustainable, and soon, simple laws of consumerism dictates that this madness was about to end. People were just no longer interested in the constant flow of books and paintings about war and drama within the artist class, and instead, they turned towards a new rising massive movement - Modernism.

Modernism declared that the era of the "philosopher writer" and the "rebellious poet" was over, it rejected deeper meaning in art and literature and was instead geared towards only fulfilling the needs of consumers. Modernist literature, compared to earlier eras, was poor in diction, vocabulary and just extremely simplistic, Modernist art held little hidden meaning and instead focused on making lifelike pictures and drawings (thus bringing vitagraphy to their attention) - and the people, tired of being bombarded with art they were unable to understand, loved it.

Militaristic Art collapsed in of itself and consumed it's own intestines, and much like the Great European War destroyed values which were held sacred since time immemorial, so did it's equivalent artistic movement.

The world's most popular and famous team sport arose in the second half of the 19th century, and for it's invention, credit must go to the Polish sports coach and teacher Albert Pruszkowski. A humble, but energetic and intelligent coach for the students of Luxemburg University in Lublin, he was disappointed that the traditional class routine of outdoor sports, usually football, would be constantly cut short either by poor weather or constant injuries from players tackling each other, kicking each other and worse. In addition, most common sports were simply too slow for his taste. After weighing his options, Pruszkowski decided to develop a game of his own to be played by his class. It consisted of two peach baskets, each nailed to an opposite side of the wall, and a ball - the game was set to be played in teams and the objective was to toss the ball into the basket, earning a goal - and the team with the highest number of goals when the timer runs out would be declared the winner. Pruszkowski wrote down 14 basic rules for the game, and the first match was played between two teams of Luxemburg University students on January 21st, 1879.

The game was a success - both the students and the coach enjoyed the faster paced play and the somewhat higher complexity of the game when compared to usual sports, allowing tactics and strategies to be built around them. Pruszkowski labelled the game "peach farming" (uprawa brzoskwini), a joking reference to the peach baskets used as goals for the game, but the students found a more simple name for the sport - "we are throwing a ball into baskets, so why not basketball?".

The rise of basketball started with public education - students who played the game would end up teaching the game to other schools, and to prevent the devolution of the rules through oral spreading, Pruszkowski created and published a simple tutorial and a set of rules for the game in 1881, - but it's true jump to popularity began when the Visegradian military and public organizations adopted it for their own play. The first country outside of Visegrad where a basketball game was organized was South Germania, doing so in Vienna in 1883, followed by Lithuania in 1884 (Vilnius). The first basketball game outside of Europe took place in New Utrecht, Vespucia Free State, in 1895. Now that the game reached multinational popularity and the game became familiar to thousands, new features were introduced - wooden baskets were replaced by metal hoops, nets and backboards, the rules were constantly revised, adding new concepts like long and short throws and dribbling, and by the time that the Great European War began, basketball had entrenched itself as one of the most famous sports of the modern era.

The idea of organizing a Basketball World Championship was first proposed in 1907, but the hope of bringing the sport to the world stage was cut off by rising tensions in Europe and the subsequent Great European War, and it was only in 1918 that the recently founded International Basketball Federation (IBF) could organize the championship, which took place in neutral Italy on June of the same year. The home of the sport, Visegrad, won gold medals, handily defeating the second place winner, VFS. The bronze medal was won by Lithuania - and while it may look like an unsatisfactory result, especially for a country which was one of the first adopters of the sport and had gathered a team which would later become legends, the Lithuanians were actually an edge away from the highest place. Their match against Visegrad in the semifinals was lost with the difference of only a single point (the result was 15:16), and this set the stage for a long standing rivalry between the Visegradians and the Lithuanians.

Not just in championship matches, but also in national games. The Visegradian Szövetségi kosárlabda liga (SKL, "Federal Basketball League") and the Lithuanian Respublikos lyga (R-lyga, "Republican League") would become the two most famous professional basketball leagues in Europe, attracting players worldwide.

However, because of later events, only one of these two associations survived to present day.