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Suppose that George Washington simply refused to come out of retirement to serve as the first President of the United States and stayed at Mount Vernon after returning from the Constitutional Convention. Would his historical reputation be better, worse, or pretty much the same as it is today?

What if the Battle of Poltava had been a Swedish victory on the scale of the Battle of Narva, with the Russian army effectively destroyed as a fighting force and its remnants fleeing in disorder away from the battlefield?

What game was Napoleon III playing by meddling in Mexico in the 1860s? If he really wanted to create a French protectorate, why not dispatch a member of the Bonaparte family rather than a Hapsburg? Did he plan to keep the whole arrangement informal, with the Second Mexican Empire as a loyal...

By the time he left the Presidency, George Washington had become convinced that slavery was an evil that needed to eventually be eradicated. He was already engaged in the complicated legal wrangling that eventually saw all of his own slaves freed in his will. Like Jefferson and Madison...

If often seems that every single thread that discusses any aspect of the American Civil War, so matter how insignificant, degenerates into a rancorous yelling match about whether the South ever had a chance to win the war at all. Many have complained in the past that this tendency has the effect...

Militarily speaking, what is the absolute best case scenario for Poland, with a POD no earlier than August 1, 1939?

Did the Napoleonic Wars have a decisive battle, an engagement which determined the ultimate outcome of the conflict? If so, what was it? Trafalgar? Borodino? Leipzig? Waterloo? Something else? Discuss.

Why did France fall so easily in 1940? Discuss!

Assuming that the Allies had succeeded at Gallipoli in 1915, a scenario for which there are any number of PODs, how significant to the course of the war would the result have been? By victory, assume we have a best case scenario - the straits cleared, Constantinople occupied by Allied forces...

What was Napoleon's most impressive victory? 1. Castiglione 2. Arcole 3. Rivoli 4. The Pyramids 5. Mount Tabor 6. Aboukir 7. Marengo 8. Ulm 9. Austerlitz 10. Jena-Auerstedt 11. Friedland 12. Eckmuhl 13. Wagram 14. Borodino 15. Lutzen 16. Bautnez 17. Dresden 18. Six Days...

Suppose that Benedict Arnold's treasonous plan to betray West Point to the British had succeeded. Does this mean that the British win the Revolutionary War?

What if the swing to the Conservatives in January of 1910 had been a bit bigger than it was IOTL and enabled the Tories to garner 336 seats? Does this mean no People's Budget? Does this mean no House of Lords reform?

Which year of the American Civil War had the greatest likelihood of a Confederate victory?

Who was the superior general: the Duke of Wellington or the Duke of Marlborough?

What if Lend-Lease aid to the USSR was terminated following the landings in Normandy in June of 1944?

What if P.G.T. Beauregard, rather than John C. Pemberton, had been given command of the Department of Mississippi and East Louisiana (the department than included Vicksburg and Port Hudson) in October of 1862?

I just posted this on my blog, but I thought the good folks at AH.com would like to hear about it directly.

The "Ever Victorious Army" was a force of Chinese soldiers trained and led by European and American officers to fight the Taiping rebels. It numbered between 2,000 and 5,000 men at different times. After the death of its original commander, the American Frederick Ward, the Imperial Court asked...

What is the latest plausible POD that prevents Germany from becoming unified and keeps it in its traditional state of separate small kingdoms, dukedoms, ect.?

Which of the following military campaigns, all of which were either indecisive or Confederate defeats, could most easily have been an outright Confederate victory? 1. Fort Henry and Donelson Campaign 2. Shiloh Campaign 3. Maryland Campaign 4. Kentucky Campaign 5. Stones River/Murfreesboro...