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As a non-religious person who is nonetheless interested in the Catholic church from a historical POV, it always struck me how the Church transformed itself more or less overnight in the past 50 years. From Pope John XXIII's Vatican II through Paul VI endorsing liberation theology in a roundabout...

World War I isn't really my strong area but this is a thought I've had since learning history in high school so I figured I'd see what you all think. The spark that sets off the chain of events leading to world war is, of course, Archduke Franz Ferdinand getting assassinated. This leads to...

I don't usually get into WWII discussions because I'm not nearly as well-read on them as some of the people here, so forgive any blatant oversimplifications I might make here. Crux of my question is, what if Hitler budgets the Wehrmacht more time for Barbarossa and the operation launches in...

I've been thinking about doing a Yugo TL when I've run my DDR TL out of steam (don't worry, those reading, it's not quite there yet, just on another creative hiatus). Specifically, one that doesn't see things go to hell--or at least, not nearly as much--as in OTL. So, first question: assuming...

Ok, I know this must sound ASB as hell, but bear with me here. Anyone who reads old-school sci-fi, particularly any L. Ron Hubbard, has heard the apocryphal story that Hubbard once told a colleague that "anyone who wanted to make money would create his own religion." While Hubbard dabbled in...

Challenge: With any POD from 1900 to present, create conditions wherein the border fence between Mexico and the United States is built primarily by Mexican authorities. This can be for reasons of keeping Mexicans in, Americans out, or any combination/proportion of the above. Extra challenge...

So I was looking through a book on the history of the World's Fair and came across a few old daguerreotypes of the Tour Eiffel, a tower built with the modern methods of the 1889 World's Fair to showcase French industry. Apparently, it attracted quite a bit of controversy in its time, and was...

This is related to another TL idea I have when my current one ends. Is it plausible for Lech Walesa to be executed by any Polish communist government for his agitating, and what would the result be? I'm thinking most plausible is that when Jaruzelski comes to power and imprisons him, he gets...

As The Simpsons concludes its 23rd year on air, it's hard to deny that it's had a massive impact on American television, between putting Fox on the map and getting a lot of writers their starts (notably Conan O'Brien). Not to mention influencing pop culture and being one of the first cartoons...

If Karl Marx for whatever reason doesn't take the Communist League's commission to publish The Communist Manifesto, what if anything changes in the development and spread of Socialism and Communism? Obviously these schools of thought existed before Marx, but arguably it was Marx and Engels...

I doubt many people here follow horse racing as closely as I do but if you've turned on or glanced at ESPN or a sports section at all in the past week you've probably seen the news. Prospero, Barbaro's first offspring, just set the record for highest price paid for a thoroughbred. Some obscene...

Short and to the point: is it possible within the bounds of reality to have the Soviets ask for/coerce support out of the Warsaw Pact for the Soviet-Afghan War, and what if anything changes in the war if you get say 50k extra troops on the ground? Disclaimer: if someone presents me with a...

So the story goes that Harrison Ford had given up on acting and taken up carpentry when he got a call to do some work in a Hollywood exec's house. That exec was an up-and-coming director named George Lucas who was pitching a space opera called Star Wars. Well of course, the rest is history. But...

Breaking: E. German Leader Honecker Dead At 73 September 29th, 1985 East Berlin (AP)-- Longtime East German leader Erich Honecker has died, according to East German state officials. State-run news and Radio Berlin International announced Honecker's death, allegedly from "severe exhaustion of...

Spinning off the NFL-USFL thread, how plausible is a merger of the NFL and CFL? I know they play a slightly modified version of the game in Canada but the rules could be reconciled without much difficulty. At times I wonder how this hasn't been seriously considered, given the NFL's massive...

An idea I had earlier today. Excusing the flocks of a certain winged extraterrestrial mammal, suppose for the sake of argument that Hitler lives to stand trial at Nuremberg. Be it by the Russians capturing him or someone convincing him to give it up to the Americans, these details aren't...

It's probably the most well-known murder in Hollywood after the Black Dahlia so I'll spare the long introduction. Charles Manson's "family" breaks into the Polanski residence and kills Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski among others. In a bitter twist, some accounts claim Polanski wasn't expecting...

An idea I had awhile ago but didn't get much input on, so I'll rephrase and see what everyone thinks. In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev had been in power in the Soviet Union for a year and was immensely popular among the citizens of some Warsaw Pact countries, especially East Germany. 1986 is also the...

It's been a few years since I really did a lot of research on the Titanic so I may have a few facts skewed, but here goes nothing. It's been my understanding that the sinking of the Titanic, both the circumstances and the human cost, spurred a lot of reforms in Maritime Law that we take for...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_Gerlach I'm thinking of creating a TL where Germany doesn't unify in 1990 but the DDR goes through a reformist phase in line with Gorbachev. The initial POD I've decided on is the 11th Party Congress in 1986. With Gorbachev newly-arrived to power and looking...