Search results for query: *

Forum search Google search

  1. What if a populist peoples religion/cult had emerged in Rome prior to the spread of Christianity?

    I've heard of the cult of Isis but I guess if it checked all the right boxes why did it stay a literal mystery to most people in Rome while Christianity grew exponentially even prior to Constantine? I guess either Christianity's message was true or it had the right elements to be quite popular.

  2. What if a populist peoples religion/cult had emerged in Rome prior to the spread of Christianity?

    One of the claims for the appeal and rapid growth of Christianity throughout the Roman world was its inclusion of populist elements. It promised, at the very least, an equal resting place for souls in the afterworld, regardless of social class. This aspect held strong appeal for those on the...

  3. What if the Emancipation Proclamation had never been issued during the American Civil War?

    What impact of the actual war effort did the emancipation proclamation have and was that much a factor in it being issued in the first place? What would have been the impact of the civil war ending with slavery still very much in place legally in the nation?

  4. WI China remained fragmented among rival kingdoms as Europe was?

    An argument often presented for why Europe, which was more or less a backwater compared to Imperial China throughout the Middle Ages, pulled ahead of China in terms of technological and exploratory development into the early modern age, is that there had not been a unified continental empire to...

  5. If the Indigenous of the Americas had stronger immunity to European diseases how would colonization have proceeded?

    If, instead of the 80-90% death rate experienced by the indigenous population, as attributed to foreign diseases, the death rate was closer to the 30-60% seen in Europe from the Black Death, which itself impacted by an eastern-originated disease. With a much larger surviving indigenous...

  6. Could an expansion-minded post-Civil War United States have been able to challenge the hegemony of the British Empire by 1900?

    US militarism has never been that tied to a 'WASP identity.' There were several Union regiments of Irish Catholics in the Civil War. Additionally, the Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1924 Immigration Act were passed during times of a very weak federal military. I think those Italians, Hungarians...

  7. Could an expansion-minded post-Civil War United States have been able to challenge the hegemony of the British Empire by 1900?

    After the Civil War, the federal army was relatively quickly disbanded and downsized. The main focus of the military shifted to pacifying the remaining Native American tribes on the plains and southwest, which did not consume too many resources. What if the U.S. perspective shifted to wanting...

  8. Was the Spanish Empire the last of the ancient style empires instead of the first of the modern colonial ones?

    Inspired by this passage I came across: Is there a factual basis to this argument? Instead of the empire of Spain being the harbinger of modern colonialism and empire building it was instead the last vestige of the old style empire?

  9. What if China invaded and reclaimed Hong Kong by force in the early 1980s?

    Similar to Argentina's invasion of the Falklands, what if an increasingly nationalistic China decided to forcefully capture Hong Kong instead of waiting for the lease to expire at the end of the century? At that time, China was not as economically or militarily powerful as it is today. However...

  10. Was the fighting more intense and brutal on the Western Front during World War I or the Eastern Front during World War II?

    Based on the conditions, which do you think was the worse environment for the average soldier? Neither of them was a day at the zoo, but if you had to choose to be a conscript in either scenario, which "meat grinder" would you have picked to be thrown into?

  11. Military impact of tactical nuclear weapons used during the Vietnam war

    This was apparently requested by admiral Harry D. Felt and was actually considered by McNamara, more details can be seen here. I can only imagine the social and political ramifications, however what would have been the actual miliary impacts in deploying tactical nukes to fight the NVA? I have...

  12. Could there have been an equivalent to the western front stalemate in the American Civil War?

    Could the fight between the Union and the South have become bogged down in a similar stalemate as the Western Front in World War I did? Complete with heavy emphasis on trench warfare. Not that trench warfare did not occur in the American Civil War IOTL, however, not to the extent it did in World...

  13. Had the radical Republicans had more control over reconstruction would we have seen a "de-confederation" akin to Denazification?

    What do you attribute then the reason that there was no similar widespread "lost cause" myth for the Nazis that lingered on in post-war Germany the way it did in the South for so many years if not for a successful denazification? Not that neo-Nazi's didn't or don't exist in Germany just that in...

  14. Had the radical Republicans had more control over reconstruction would we have seen a "de-confederation" akin to Denazification?

    Honestly, a rough approximation of Strafgesetzbuch section 86a is what I had in mind.

  15. Had the radical Republicans had more control over reconstruction would we have seen a "de-confederation" akin to Denazification?

    Argentina was famously known to have harbored quite a few in-hiding Nazi members. Perhaps Confederate generals/Officers fleeing to Brazil and Argentina?

  16. Had the radical Republicans had more control over reconstruction would we have seen a "de-confederation" akin to Denazification?

    The reconstruction period following the Civil War is generally acknowledged to have fallen short. Aside from the additional 90 years of Jim Crow laws, there had been a continued reverence for the Confederacy and its generals by a large subset the white population. What if the approach to the...

  17. Could a 1943 D-Day have conversely lead to an atomic bombed Germany?

    It has been argued here quite extensively that an Operation Sledgehammer launched in 1943 would likely have been successfully repelled by the Germans. This would have made the Allies more hesitant to launch a second invasion so soon in 1944. Consequently, we can assume that the war in Europe...

  18. Colonization of Australia with a Maori dominated Australia

    What would have happened if, in the centuries before European colonisation, the Maoris or another similar Polynesian warrior culture had come to rule Australia over the indigenous aboriginal populations? Given that they mounted a more effective military resistance to European encroachment than...

  19. Most feasible way the Nazis could have attacked US territory?

    Is this including the Afghanistan and Iraq wars? In OTL the US of course still launched a massive war effort against Germany regardless of the fact they weren't attacked directly by them in the home land. So I was thinking of what additional costs for defense would be factored in the WW2 scenario.

  20. Most feasible way the Nazis could have attacked US territory?

    Would the national response to the 9/11 attacks be an example for that, in how an attack that really had very limited to no real miliary impact on a nation, ended up costing that nation hundreds of billions of dollars in defensive response.
Top