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  1. New Scientist Flash Fiction 2010

    A selection of (very) short stories in New Scientist on the subject of 'Futures that never happened'. So basically AH, although a lot of ASB-type stuff too. But I liked it, and so here it is...

  2. No Premature Death of Prince Ferdinand Philippe, Duke of Orléans

    As far as I can see, Prince Ferdinand Philippe, Duke of Orléans, the oldest son of King Louis-Philippe of France, was a liberal, middle-class type of royal with a great deal of popular support. However, he died in an accident in 1842 at the age of 32. Six years later his father was forced from...

  3. Avoiding the Yom Kippur War

    In 1967, after the Six Day War, in OTL the National Unity Government of Israel voted unanimously to return the Sinai to Egypt and the Golan Heights to Syria in return for peace agreements. The Israeli decision was to be conveyed to the Arab states by the U.S. government. The U.S. was informed of...

  4. The Chinese Invention of Glass

    On QI last week they mentioned that the Chinese never invented glass, and as such were hindered in their development by the lack of chemically inert glass containers for chemical experiments, and also from the lack of glass for spectacles which could extend the working life of scholars by 10-15...

  5. 'Against the Day' and 'Through the Night' by Michael Cronin

    Against The Day and Through The Night are a pair of young adult AH books set in an alternate 1940s where Britain is under German occupation. I got the first one out of our local library on spec., but it was good enough that I borrowed the second one too. There is also a third book in the series...

  6. Amazon.com's Alternate History Community

    What the thread title says: http://www.amazon.com/tag/alternate%20history/ref=tag_dpp_ct_itdp

  7. No Alfred Russel Wallace

    Alfred Russel Wallace came with the idea of evolution by natural selection independantly of Darwin, and his communicating this to Darwin prompted the publication of 'On the Origin of Species' in 1859, in a relatively short, populist form. However, suppose Wallace was not around, having perhaps...

  8. Scurvy Cure Adopted in 1601

    I've recently been reading 'Nathaniels Nutmeg' and from it it appears that, among others, James Lancaster used lemon juice as a cure for scurvy in 1601. This was reported to the Admiralty, but nothing came of it, and the curative power of lemon juice was not widely known until 1747 and not...

  9. Charles Darwin thrown off the HMS Beagle in 1831

    Apparently, in 1831 when the Beagle arrived at Salvador in Brazil, Darwin had a serious disagreement with Robert Fitzroy, the captain of the Beagle, over slavery and was banned from his company. In OTL Fitzroy got over it and apologised, but what if he did not, and Darwin left the Beagle at...

  10. No Battle of the Alamo

    Suppose during the Texan struggle for independance from Mexico, there is no battle of the Alamo? Texas still gains its independance, but now various people who died there, like Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, are still alive. How does their survival affect events in the future? Davy Crockett in...

  11. Challenge: Elective Monarchy

    What would it take to have a nation with a form of popularly elected monarchy, in which the monarch is elected by the people as a whole, but from among the descendants of the current monarch? It sounds like something different to OTL elective monarchies, but I could see it working as well as...

  12. US Civil War in 1850

    If President Zachary Taylor had not died in 1850 it seems possible that he would have began a US civil war a decade earlier than in OTL. In this case the north and south would have been considerably more evenly matched than they were in OTL. Does anyone have any ideas as to how likely this...

  13. AH Challenge: Two Ottoman Empires

    With a PoD after 1800, how could we end with a situation where the territory of the Ottoman Empire is divided into two states, both of which consider themselves to be the true Ottoman Empire? What events might cause this to happen? And how might the division occur? Would it be north-south...

  14. Napoleon the Explorer

    La Pérouse was a French Navy officer and explorer. In 1785 he was appointed to lead an expedition to the Pacific. One of the men who applied for the voyage was 16-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte, then a second lieutenant from Paris's military academy. He made the preliminary list but he was...

  15. AH Challenge: The Sun Never Sets on the German Empire

    Just a random thought, but how might we get a German Empire as large and far-flung as the British Empire by, say, the end of the nineteenth century? It shouldn't control all of Europe, but have major colonies all around the world. How far back does the PoD have to be for this to be remotely...

  16. No VW Beetle

    According to the Wikipedia article on the Volkswagen Beetle: So it sounds like things could easily have gone a different way, if the bomb had exploded in the first place or while being removed, or if Hirst had been less persuasive, and the VW Beetle would have become just another of the...

  17. Limits Imposed on the Power of UK Unions in 1970

    According to episode 3 of the History of Modern Britain on the BBC last night, in 1969 Barbara Castle produced a white paper which outlined a proposed act to curb the power of British Unions. However, despite support from the PM (Harold Wilson), and pleading from both him and Barbara Castle this...

  18. What if the Taborites had done better?

    The Taborites were a religious proto-Protestant community centered on the Bohemian city of Tábor during the Hussite Wars in the 15th century. They had a communist-like society, sharing all food and valuable supplies, but maintained their private property and land rights, promised that people...

  19. AH Challenge: Land Lighthouses still in use

    Can anyone come up with a circumstance in which land lighthouses are still in use by the present day? I was wondering if perhaps they could somehow come into use on trade routes across the Sahara Desert, or something like that...

  20. A Leader for the Indian Mutiny

    As I understand it one of the causes of the Indian Mutiny failing, or at least failing in the way it did, was the lack of leadership among the mutineers, which led to their having numerous factions which did not always cooperate well with one another, as well as causing problems like the troops...
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