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So, amphetamines. OTL they were discovered in the 1880s... but then, bizarrely, they just sat around for the next 40 years, a laboratory curiosity with no known use. Their pharmacological significance wasn't appreciated until the 1920s! Now, once this /was/ understood, America's young...

POD: he last two Bourbon kings of France, Louis XVIII and Charles X, are not complete tools. Now, you could argue with a straight face that Louis was not, in fact, a tool. He wasn't very bright, nor did he have any talent for politics. But he accepted most of the social changes wrought by the...

Is there a plausible POD to save the classic "floppy" comic book? you know, 32 pages, glossy cover, three staples? Yes, they still exist, but they've dwindled down to a niche product found only in an ever-shrinking number of specialty stores. Is there any way to keep them a mass-market...

POD: leaving the world no poorer, US Supreme Court Justice James Clark McReynolds dies in a simple slip-and-fall accident. It's the summer of 1933, and Franklin Roosevelt has been president for less than six months. Now what? (No, I'm not being unpleasant. McReynolds was arguably the...

So David Bowie. Bowie has had an intermittent career as an actor. And, you know, he's not bad. Not bad at all. Oh, he's not brilliant. He'll never be an Olivier. But he's a solid midlist character actor with a fine command of body language and expression. So, POD: the childhood...

OTL the development of chemistry proceeded at a pretty smooth pace throughout the 19th century. There were individual flashes of inspiration, like the benzene ring, but overall it was the work of thousands of chemists and researchers across Western Europe. Could it have gone faster? I think...

Jean-Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem. President of the Republic of South Vietnam from his "election" in 1955 to his assassination in the back of an APC in early November 1963. Hard-working, meticulous, energetic. Celibate, passionately patriotic, an ardent Catholic. Ferociously anti-Communist...

POD 1941: 16 year old Jack Spicer picks up an issue of Astounding and is moved to compose and write a short story, which is promptly accepted by John Campbell. Spicer had what can fairly be called a science fictional imagination. And while he's remembered today primarily as a poet, he was a...

Say he falls in love with someone else, is never inspired to go study, and remains a humble shepherd (albeit an unusually thoughtful one). On one hand, there were like a hundred other tannim; surely the ranks would close and the work would get done. On the other hand, by whom? Akiva really...

Rhodesian WI, POD c. 1955: Make South Rhodesian Prime Minister Garfield Todd a political genius. OTL Todd was a liberal visionary who dreamed of allowing Rhodesia's emerging black middle class to become junior partners in white rule. Understand that this was not a plan for black majority...

Not a WI, just thinking out loud. This category is defined as people who would have ended up ruling Great Britain if they hadn't dropped dead of natural causes first. Because there were a lot of dead babies back in the day, candidates must have erached at least 10 years of age to...

There's long been a tradition in Ethiopia that the Ark of the Covenant rests in a monastery in Aksum, in the northern part of the country. It's supposed to have been brought back from Jerusalem by the Queen of Sheba. Certainly the Ethiopian Church is keeping something at a monastery in...

POD c. 1900: Kaiser Wilhelm, in one of his bursts of enthusiasm, declares that German South-West Africa! is the land of the future! The Kaiser's interest will wane in a few years, but by that time Germany has thrown roughly half a battleship's worth of cash at the distant colony. This being...

August 1, 1943: Operation Tidal Wave, aka the Treetop Raid, strikes at the Ploiesti oil complex. Ploiesti was the largest oil center in Axis Europe. The city was surrounded by a six-mile-wide ring of refineries, cracking towers, and storage tanks, a complex that produced more than half of all...

OTL: on January 12, 1945 the Soviets opened their great penultimate offensive on the Eastern Front. 2.2 million troops, 4500 tanks and literally tens of thousands of heavy guns struck with massive force against the German center in Poland. A day later a secondary offensive opened up in East...

OTL they missed him by a decade. Shaka was assassinated in 1828; the Trekkers came up against his much less competent successor, Dingane. Even against Dingane, the Trekkers lost the first couple of battles. Isolated Boer units were cut off and wiped out at the Weenen Massacre, and then the...

It could have, and arguably should have. Hams won by only around 3% -- 30,000 votes out of over a million. The way the votes were apportioned (a mix of list and districts) turned that into a whopping majority in Palestine's Legislative Council -- 74 seats out of 132. But a fairly small shift...

Has anyone done a "Pink Map" TL? Brief googling doesn't show it. N.B., not talking about the gay dating application. This Pink Map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Map Short version: in 1889-90, the Portuguese made a short-lived attempt to link their two large African colonies together...

Another fragment from TL where Zangara's bullet went this way instead of that, and killed President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. * * * * * When I started working out this TL, I was repeatedly surprised by various implications. Here's one: OTL, FDR stole the thunder of the far left. The...

Way back in 1999, I did a series of posts on soc.history.what-if on the consequences of a successful assassination of FDR (instead of the near-miss of OTL). Seeing the recent thread on the same topic here inspired me to dig up one of those old posts. I hope nobody minds. The inspiration...