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There's also the added angle of Huey Long was a rival to FDR, who is justifiably beloved on this site and others for his numerous achievements in domestic policy. So there's an inborn bias against anyone who is FDR's opposition. It isn't to say that Huey Long didn't have numerous faults, but he...

Not possible IMHO, a lot of residents of Saint-Petersburg have always regarded their city as "Peter", changing it to Petrograd just won't work. Really, the problems with renaming the city are a great illustration of the issues of politically-motivated name changes in general. You can make a map...

Not really possible: the USA's close relations with the Shah saw to it that the USA was intrinsically connected to the decades of tyranny that the Iranian people had endured under the Shah's rule. If the US had extradited the Shah back to Iran to face trial, that certainly could have gone a...

There did seem to be a certain degree of fondness in Europe for Islam at the time and it got even moreso after WWI. Kind of kooky when you think about it compared to Europe today.

Back in the early 20th-century, as with today, the majority of the world's Muslim population lived in Southeast Asia and the Indian Subcontinent. The Russian Empire, for its part, had more Muslims under its rule than the Ottoman Empire itself on the eve of WWI. So the majority of the world's...

I'm sorry but this idea simply isn't consistent with how Chiang actually ruled both China and Taiwan. A lot of where the notion of GMD cronyism comes from is actually primarily from the Chinese Communist Party and the various propaganda efforts they made while they ruled Shaanxi. Who as the...

The only major positive developments that could be attributed to Mao's China are the substantial increases in literacy rates, land ownership, and his programs to send the "barefoot doctors" to rural areas so that peasants could have access to healthcare. These aren't insignificant developments...

Mao had a deep and abiding displeasure for intellectuals because he himself was not terribly well-educated but had always wanted to be. So it sort of had this situation where Mao constantly wanted to be an intellectual yet fiercely resented those who were because they represented something he...

Also it was hardly a notion exclusive to the communists. Script reform had been discussed in some capacity by Chinese reformers for decades before it was actually implemented. Although I personally think a surviving GMD government would pursue script reform with the same intense Soviet-style...

GMD rule could be brutal when it came to dealing with communists (which would indisputably be a component of Chiang's rule if he had remained the leader of China, as Chiang was personally deeply anticommunist in his leanings) but even the worst excesses of the White Terror and similar events...

Or the Cultural Revolution which was perhaps the single largest period of wholesale cultural destruction and desecration perpetrated in one single country in the 20th-century.

This isn't a topic confined solely to the realm of speculation, we have a fair amount of evidence from when Chiang was leader of both China and just of the island of Taiwan. Although the nature of his rule in mainland China would of course be altered by his circumstances, we can nonetheless make...

Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-Shek were most assuredly not the same as each other in any real way. Aside from the fact that both of them were, at some point in their lives, leaders of the Chinese nation, the similarities pretty much end there. There's not even really that much similarity in terms of...

Spain pre-1492 was a rather poor country. And its chances of emerging as a stable, prospering commercial economy were pretty strongly scrapped by the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from Spain. Doing so effectively closed the door on centuries of a rather advanced commercial economy in Spain...

I'm not sure it would even need a real Anglo-American War a la 1812 to accomplish. In a situation like that, what guarantee is there that American citizens who consider the British to be unwanted occupies simply don't rise up and throw the British out? Sure, one can make a fair argument that...