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We've talked occassionally about what a Lincolnite Reconstruction would look like. But let's suppose that in April of 1865, Booth's gun misfires, and he kills Mary Todd Lincoln. How would a griefstricken Lincoln bind together the nation?

One of the less discussed features of the late 18th and early 19th centuries is the hostility towards Britain on the part of the rest of Europe. The American Revolution saw the British at war with the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, fand aced with a hostile league of neutrality led by Catherine...

This might belong in pre 1900, since IMO you can't get a Communist/Socialist America without a POD before 1900, and even then it looks more like a muscular French Popular Front than the Soviet Union, but... Would America change its flag in the event of a Communist or Socialist victory? Red...

I've been thinking lately about the possibility of a Red Germany (across the Rhine, at least) in the aftermath of WW1 or the Russian invasion of Poland. [1] There's no guarantee that a Russian-German bloc would hold, anymore than China and the Soviets formed an eternal union. But they would...

Okay, assume that Napoleon settles down after Tilsit. He doesn't invade Spain; Russia ends up coming to terms with the French hegemony over western Europe, although relations are... tense. Nobody can really break the continent. I don't think Napoleon would be able to (he never did in OTL...

This might be me, but I feel like there's a tendency around here to consider Napoleon a bit of a... second string player, who was somewhat of an oaf compared to the Machiavellian mastermind, Bismarck. But it seems to me that Napoleon III was in many ways a pretty sharp politician as leader...

An idle thought, inspired by some of the older discussions of the future of White Russia. We tend to presume that the default scenario is that it ends up with a Western European standard of living, like Finland and the Baltic States have. But... A quick look at per capita incomes around...

I've been thinking about the major efforts of a lot of major attempts to reshape the planet for human use in the 20th century, and how many of them were epic failures. The Tanzania Peanut Scheme, the Virgin Fields Disaster, the destruction of the Aral Sea.... Have there been any attempts to...

I'm not sure about the probability of this What If, but here it goes... In OTL, one of the ideas considered to appease Nazi Germany was to establish multinational control over the Subsaharan African colonies. This was strongly supported by the British Left (the Labor Party advocated extending...

Or something suitably like it, of course. One thing that has occurred to me history is how similar the French officers in Algeria were to the Japanese officers in the 1930s. Assassinations, torture, rape, terror (it's been estimated 800,000 Algerian civilians died). (And in the 1930s Blum...

So, let's posit no Hitler in Europe; Germany rearms, at a less moderate pace and without the Uboats to challenge the UK. This lets the UK focus on east Asia, and it adopts a more belligerent tone to Japanese expansion, ultimately getting the League to impose sanctions, which America agrees to...

This is something of a random musing, inspired by reading Spanish history and by current events. We've seen plenty of governments fall over the last century without a foreign invasion. We have also, sadly, seen many instances where a despotic government was able to crush protestors and...

This is something of idle speculation, but... In OTL, reforms in October of 1918, along with realization that the war was spinning out of control, led to the November Revolution and the birth of the Weimar Republic. In OTL, Britain never faced anything like the crises and domestic hardships...

I suspect this is a low probability WI, but... Between 1913 and 1948, 30 out of the then 48 states enforced anti-miscegenation laws.. Only Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Alaska, Hawaii, and the federal District of Columbia never enacted them...

Other than the Native Americans, I mean. But first, some descriptions of interracial violence in the American South, and a comparison to Eastern Europe: "The lynchers were not content merely to kill the victim, the act of lynching was often transformed into a public spectacle, and sometimes...

So, let's take the typical (and IMO best) POD for a Union victory. The lost order isn't lost, and the CSA wins at *Antietam. The CSA gets Kentucky, Virginia, and Oklahoma, but not Arizona, New Mexico, or West Virignia. [1] But overtime, IMO economics would only favor the USA more and more, as...

This is probably low probability, but is inspired by two things: 1) Turtledove's Marxist African-Americans, who did little other than suck and die, and 2) The Communist party of America's platform in the 1930s of supporting secession for the black belt, a region stretching from Louisiana into...

One thin I have never been sure about is what were the goals of France and Britain, before the Fall of France, in World War 2? I've never come across anything other than "saving Poland. Somehow."

"I see that you European powers are taking advantage of this rebellion to meddle in America, the way you used to before the Monroe Doctrine stopped you. Napoleon props up an emperor in Mexico, and now France and England arein cahoots to support the Rebels. Well, we can play that game too. And I...

So I'm reading a book ont he Rhineland in the Revolutionary Period, and it mentions some facts that I think people here might find interesting. 1) We overestimate the importance of territorial fragmentation in the Holy Roman Empire. In some places it probably hindered economic development. In...