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I feel like the parts I've quoted here are really looking at the question from the Chinese point of view. I've already addressed some of the myriad reasons why the Chinese themselves never wanted to change, up to and including the point that other nations are barbarians. The question I'm more...

There are a multitude of very good reasons why Chinese characters, hanzi, work within the context of writing in China. To name a few: the Chinese languages are basically made of homophones which would be harder to parse written only in letters; each character carries its own meaning, so it's...

Calling the United States an incarnation of Rome in any sense is pretty empty. What is the logic here? That the Founders drew a lot of inspiration from the institutions of the Roman Republic? That doesn't matter; it's also frequently claimed they drew inspiration from the institutions of the...

China has a long history of being unified, powerful, and looked up to by its neighbors as the gold standard of civilization. Even during its phases of disunity, there was still a feeling among the populace that it "ought" to be united under an Emperor, with the Mandate of Heaven. Whenever...

The Native Americans didn't have diseases to transmit to the Europeans (excepting possibly syphilis, and that's a heavily disputed point). The vast majority of human communicable diseases jumped to humans from animals, and with very few exceptions, Native Americans weren't living in proximity...

I'm not sure people would consider that "the Beatles". The Beatles are the single most iconic band of all time, and the classic lineup of "John, Paul, George, and Ringo" is what made the Beatles what they were. Granted, Ringo only wrote two songs for Beatles albums, and John and Paul were kind...

This has already been said, but there was no way to keep the Beatles together. By 1970, tensions in the band were too high and they all resented each other too much to be able to keep working together. I also think 1971 was far too early for them to have reunited; not enough time had passed...

I'm not sure this is possible. The Spanish New World wasn't even governed as a single entity within the Empire. The four viceroyalties were different places, and the geography of Latin America is not conducive to internal travel in the age of wooden ships and wagons. The British colonies of...

I'm aware of the German meaning of the word. But you will notice that this thread is not in German, and that rather leaves it ambiguous, you see. Regardless of the word's more general meaning in German, in English it is not usual to refer to the Holy Roman Emperor as "the Kaiser". In English...

Well, he wouldn't have become Holy Roman Emperor, if that's what you mean. But I'm not sure if it is what you mean, because in English the word "Kaiser" is traditionally restricted to the rulers of the German Empire, which didn't exist until long after Napoleon's time. But the Kaisers were from...

Why would the separation be peaceful? Just because the South is seceding earlier doesn't mean the North is going to just let it go.

Would the government at the time really allow such a thing? Even if we assume that their reasoning is a racist one, "getting them away from us" so whites could go about their daily lives without having to interact with black people, what happens when those "black territories" get populous...

I actually think that the modern era is too late for this. It's true that various powers like Spain and Britain all had very large empires at various points between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. But none of them could have moved for total domination, because there was too much...

If Lincoln had lived to institute a more lenient Reconstruction, I wonder if there would have been any chance at all of Frederick Douglass getting elected later.

Well, the Muslim friend I had in high school in Alaska went by Los Angeles time. Granted, that's an artificial and somewhat sophisticated modern solution. Still, I don't doubt that the imams in a Muslim Scandinavia would come up with something.

I honestly think Colin Powell could have won in the 1990s if he had wanted to be president.

How does that mean anything different? For god's sake, Obama's father is from Africa. Obama is more literally "African-American" than someone whose ancestors were brought over centuries ago. As for the argument that Obama isn't "black" because he's also "half-white" . . . look, I get...

2012 is when their calendar cycle ended. Stupid people interpret that to mean the world itself will end, somehow. Of course, I had a calendar that already ended last December. So I bought a new calendar for this year. Crisis averted.

The easiest way to prevent American expansion early on is to remove the Louisiana Purchase. Maybe Jefferson never becomes president, or maybe he does but negotiations break down and Napoleon decides not to sell. Either way, Americans have no place to expand but into the Ohio Valley and have to...

This. I could see the United States participating in the Scramble for Africa and getting a chunk of land there. And of course we could and did take land in Asia and the Caribbean as war spoils around the turn of the century. But to try to take land in Europe itself would be a completely...