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I've been on an I, Claudius binge lately (both the miniseries and Graves' book), so the Julio-Claudian family tree is fresh in mind. Caligula had two older brothers, Drusus and Nero (not the Emperor of the same name) who were exiled/murdered by Tiberius, so in a Drusus-survives scenario (with...

Another quick thought - in the earliest persecutions, to what extent were the Romans aware of Christians as a religion distinct from Judaism? Was there a feeling analogous to "who do these young whippersnappers (theologically speaking) think they are?" This is the period still before the Jewish...

Read? Me?! NEVER! ;) (What authors/books would you recommend? I should mention that I'm driving under the influence of Bart Ehrman and wikipedia as far as my grasp of the history of the early Church goes.) Actually, the question of literacy in worship is a quite important one. Religious life in...

Happily, I missed out on the whole Dan Brown phenomenon:D-never read it, never saw the movie, though I can understand what modern christians find offensive in the whole Holy Blood, Holy Grail myth (my aunt protested The Last Temptation of Christ when it came out, so that sort of controversy is...

True (at least until the Empire-wide persecutions in the third and fourth centuries-look up Maximian and Diocletian.) What I'm looking for is some sort of formulation that would satisfy the locals that the X-tians were good Romans (a prayer for the Emperor's soul for example, but that probably...

I've lately been reading Graves' I, Claudius books, where the first few chapters of the second book are dominated by an account of the career of Herod Agrippa, which Graves interweaves with the story of early Christianity (the origin of the good Samaritan parable, the eventual suicide of Pontius...

Well, at least have fun with the idea...how about a Brazilian Zone? Bratwurst on a sword, anyone?

Soooooooo...more of a British-style Restoration than a Congress of Vienna-analogue with Russians, Persians, Portuguese and Bulgars dictating the terms and the imperial candidate. An astonishingly gentle denouement considering all that has gone before. I dunno, leaving the Republican Patriarch...

Whatever. Suzannah Hamilton (Julia in the movie) was hot... ...and, on a more serious note, seeing her performance helped me realized what a ridiculous fanboy fantasy the ostensible plot of 1984 actually is - hot young thing falls, helplessly and unbidden, for a middle-aged arthritic...

Perhaps someone like Celine or Graves would take the place of Remarque in the alt-1920s.

I suppose if the Brazilians managed to avoid the 1964 military coup and developed in a more leftist direction in the 60s and early 70s, they could conceivably get involved in the Angolan War of Independence/Civil War on the side of the leftist MPLA against the SA/US backed UNITA. However, the US...

It ain't necessarily so... As I understand it one of the major causes was the democratization of stock market speculation (essentially, the spread of 'playing the market' and 'buying on margin' to the middle class) and a huge run-up in inventories of unsold manufactured goods (sort of like the...

Well, so far as I can tell, the Victorians didn't need LSD.:D

Exactly, chris. Any Muslim minority larger than 10% of the population in the US in the early 1900s will ensure that the worldwide muslim self-image will be (for most of the 20th century, anyway) shaped by Hollywood rather than the Saudis. The Saudis, so far as I know, didn't really get their oil...

I don't know the circumstances surrounding Texas' decision to secede in the ACW, but maybe if you have more pre-war German immigration (the Germans were generally anti-slavery), and further, those immigrants clustered in the Hill Country or around El Paso, you could have a West Virginia-style...

Is there a POD that, while retaining the Protestant Reformation, could preserve Latin as the medium of commercial, religious, and diplomatic discourse in Europe, the West, and eventually America and the wider world (Basically, have Latin replace English as the global 2nd language).

“It’s the language of scholars and educated people,” said Jason Griffiths, headmaster of Brooklyn Latin. “It’s the language of people who are successful. I think it’s a draw, and that’s certainly what we sell.” NYTimes, Oct 7th, 2008

Still, probably nothing could say "resistance is futile" more than Holst blasting out of a loudspeakers accompanying a tank column crushing the ruins of Cork or Calais beneath its treads...

Speaking of alternate national anthems, I've always thought Gustav Holst's Mars, the Bringer of War would make a kick ass national anthem for some sort of althist V for Vendetta-style fascist Britain.

Now, this thread is troll-bait if ever there was, but here's my two cents - if you can't hand-wave Iraq away or capture Bin Laden, there's two major missteps that really changed the public impression of Bush. First, there was his failed attempt to privatize Social Security. His failure to do...