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I think one of the most effective ways to reduce racial tensions compared to OTL would be to prevent either the Republicans or Democrats from dominating minority voters. If both parties have a strong base with minorities, especially the african american communities, it'd make the government as a...

Iron is the 4th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, the only things that are more common than it are oxygen, silicon, and aluminum. It's also relatively easy to process if you have furnaces that can get hot enough. Pretty much any other metal is less common than iron, though there are...

You can definitely get scenarios where iron ore or scrap affect economies and war; in the leadup to WWII the US scrap embargo against Japan was harming their industry, and germany was reliant on sweedish ores for much of their high quality steelmaking. However, these are scenarios more caused by...

As others have said, low grade iron ore is plentiful. The other issue is that steel is pretty easy and cheap to recycle, the wiki page on steel has some basic statistics; rougly 40% of steel production is from recycled material. So something like an OPEC for iron ore would be pretty unrealistic...

I think electric vehicles could have become relatively widespread in the late 1800's if you manage to push up electrification and battery technology a bit faster than OTL. Cities could have seen electric vehicles become a primary mode of transportation similar to how the Electric Vehicle Company...

I more or less agree with your analysis here especially on tariffs and Hoover's refusal to abandon the gold standard, but would like to point out that the contraction of the money supply and problem of underconsumption by the public could have been better alleviated by direct aid to individuals...

First off, Chernov and Trotsky had little to do with the organization of the Revolution of 1905; both were out of the country at the time, and Marxist organization inside the country was minimal at that time and only really started getting going when unions and soviets were organized during the...

I think you'd need to start earlier right after the constitution is passed; make the Federalists politically stronger and federal infrastructure projects mainstream from the start. Then things can move from public-private partnerships in the 1800's to state ownership int eh 1900's. The key would...

True, Hoover did not completely sit on his hands during the Depression, in fact I've heard some hardcore conservatives decry him as "FDR light" though his response to it was wholly inadequate, and rather than recognize his shortcomings he instead doubled down on supporting his policies after FDR...

Dugout Doug advised by Herbert Hoover? Somehow I get the feeling this isn't going to go well at all for the US. It'd honestly probably be better if his highness bought it early in his term and left Lodge as President. Interested to see who ends up on top in Russia... and what happens with...

There's been a lot of good discussion here, but one factor I'd like to emphasize is that without a really early POD, some level of decline in the urban cores of the US post WWII is pretty much inevitable. There are several factors pushing for this, including: Automobile adoption enabling easier...

Start early enough and I think you could make the region roughly bounded by Milwaukee-Cincinnati-Pittsburgh-Detroit in the Midwest work well for rail. Distances are short enough that it can be competitve with planes, and there's a high density of urban areas ~200k in size sprinkled in among the...

Hence my earlier suggestion about no cold war reducing investment in the interstates (dovetails nicely with your ideas IMO). My point was in replying to the poster who only wanted to deal with HSR and not transit is that you can't successfully do the one without a POD that affects the other. You...

The problem is that the two issues are interrelated. There are no "low hanging fruits" for HSR in the US without changing the way a significant proportion of the US population lives and travels starting in the late 40's. Car culture, suburbanization, the interstates combined with chronic...

True that there was support for building highways, but without the Cold War boosting support for government spending and the conservatives in congress being brought on board with "we can use it to rapidly put down any commie uprisings!" there would be less of a stomach for such a big federal...

I very much doubt a national HSR network is economical in the US in the Jet Age, but could see more regional network of rail lines surviving and thriving if managed properly. The big issue is that cars are ubiquitous, fast, and cheap to drive, so you'd need to do something about that. Perhaps in...

Not really, they're not better enough than other materials for structural applications to justify the cost, and the more exotic things they are good for require a good few decades of research.

I think it's better now, the one missing link in my eyes is that the army seems to disappear from the political process after successfully executing a coup. It's probable that they'd be exerting some political pressure on the postwar restructuring to serve their interests; they won't want to be...

I agree that the postwar politics in Germany would probably be messier than depicted, but I don't think the Nazi's will be the focal point of it. A lot of Hitler's mythos only cemented itself after the fall of France. Prior to that, a lot of Germans were very nervous about the prospect of going...

In my view the easiest way to limit the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is to cut off the supply of slaves in West Africa. Two ways to achieve this could be: first, developing larger strong centralized states in the region that are more dedicated to keeping their population on their lands. Perhaps a...