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Shares of a for-profit corporation, you'd be quite right. Instead, lock the land in a trust, whose beneficiaries are (ideally) the traitor's minor children or wife, with a transferable first option written into the trust charter. Makes it tricky if at some later point you WANT to sell the land...

Corporate owned land is a good dodge, as is a hurried distressed sale ("my wife owns it" is easily dustbinned in 1865)- but I still think the States can steal a march on the Treasury here, as Kentucky seems to have already done. Faced with a choice between surrendering their land to their State...

Surely a willingness to uphold the Russian Orthodox Church is a sine qua non for becoming Tsar? Thus, for the foreign claimants, whoever expresses a believable willingness to convert jumps to the head of the line. A 1613 style assembly is probably the best domestic possibility, but leaves...

Have a look at Gregory VII. He unfrocked literally half the clergy of his era for either financial or sexual indiscretion, presiding over the largest internal housecleaning in church history. He also codified new rules for ordination that were significant contributors to the eventual Protestant...

Like, I dunno, a mandatory pilgrimage to a city on another continent? Madrassas, absolutely. Granted, it's possible that they could lose the struggle with a united and centralized al-Andalus emirate, but if we lean more towards the zillion taifas, they won't.

Banks, certainly not. He's forcing Morgan to tie himself to foreign institutions such as the Bank of England if he restores bimetallism, which will perhaps ironically make Morgan more capable of ignoring the wishes of the US government. Assuming he's willing and able to work with the unions...

I think you can't do it if the existing Declaration of Independence and US Constitution get widely accepted and adopted. You probably need the concept of hereditary nobility to make it work, which in turn probably requires an established church. The USA's unimpressive record on race is...

I'm personally interested in the Confiscation Act (particularly the state one already passed in Kentucky). Specifically, who gets the confiscated lands? The notion that the federal government has a higher claim on them than the states runs counter to precedent in this era - and, attainder or...

Synarchism as briefly presented in the Shikaku-mon writeup differs from OTL totalitarian ideologies only in that there is no pretense of universal egalitarianism - while any individual might be reshapable into any profession, we can't all be proletarian laborers, or honorable soldiers, or...

King George Washington would have been in a position to set any terms he likes as the Constitution is debated and adopted, and he would have demanded that his stepson George be acknowledged as his heir before he consented to the crown. So the American monarchy explicitly recognizes adopted...

Presumably the OP and others have read For All Time, in which a US President ("Little Bob" LaFolette) does commit suicide on live national television? In my opinion, that was still within the believable part.

That's a different scenario, though. In both cases, Jefferson will claim to be the rightful winner that the people (and state legislatures) voted for, and Burr is an usurper. He has the express support of the militia in Virginia and Maryland, and threatened to call them out and take Washington...

While there's a fairly credible bibliography there, the idea that Mohism would be good for technical progress is certainly a new idea to me. I've usually seen it portrayed as the most aggressively anti-intellectual school of ancient Chinese thought; while Master Mo did seem to single out music...

While England is in disarray, Scotland is not; Ludovic Stewart, Earl of Lennox was already running the place, and has no rivals or even outspoken critics in Scotland. His position is so commanding that, were he to declare himself King of Scotland in the wake of these events, his position would...

The USA still isn't really centralized enough to make a national honours system make sense; as has already been pointed out, we DO give national medals, decorations and memberships, and by and large the public neither knows nor cares about any of them. Arguably, the USA is too big for ordinary...

I have to admit, the Devourer Ambassador to Korea must be a fascinating individual in his own right - loyal enough to appease Red Tiger's paranoia and dedicated to his form of thought, but clever and subtle enough to play the game. I would be very worried about that man. Do the Devourers have...

Freeing all the slaves and throwing the Anglos back across the Mississippi doesn't seem like it would trouble Santa Anna to me, assuming a complete battlefield victory. Heck, doing the first even if he can't do the second creates a Texas more inclined to side with Mexico than the USA even if...

I'd be interested to see that refutation (what book? or is it excerpted online?), although I generally have a poor opinion of Friedman. When convertibility was suspended in 1861, the US, like most developed nations, was on a bimetallic standard. Only Britain idiosyncratically maintained that...

As others have mentioned, he's not unknown if that sort of thing interests you. However, his stuff doesn't get translated out of French so much, so the Anglophone world has heard of him less. Also, Marx still has believers. Proudhon's ideas made sense at the time but assume a currency...

Actually, there were plans to admit the Muscogee/Creek as a state during Washington's administration. Washington and Knox were both keen on it, borders subject to negotiation but probably roughly OTL Alabama. The plan failed because of the Creek chief, Alexander McGillivray, who wasn't really...