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  1. MrP

    WI: Teleprinters instead of telephones?

    Not sure whether to post this in pre- or post-1900, as it sort of straddles the line. A couple of decades ago, when cell phones began taking off in a big way, few predicted that as a result live audio communication would decline and be largely superseded by texting. So what if the telephone had...
  2. MrP

    WI Bessie Coleman doesn't die in 1926?

    Bessie "Queen Bess" Coleman was the first African-American woman pilot. Born in a family of Texas sharecroppers, she heard the stories of fighter pilots returning from the war in Europe while living in Chicago, and decided to learn to fly. Since US flight schools didn't admit women or nonwhites...
  3. MrP

    AH Challenge: Alejandro Jodorowsky, religious prophet

    Alejandro Jodorowsky is well-known in the AH community, being responsible for one of the most fascinating what-ifs in the history of cinema, namely his aborted film adaptation of Dune. Turns out he is quite the Protean figure: As anyone who has seen the engrossing documentary Jodorowsky's Dune...
  4. MrP

    AH Challenge: President Clint Eastwood

    I'm quite sure we've had this before, but I don't recall the idea popping up recently. Inspired by this comment in the American politics thread: The challenge is to have Clint Eastwood become President of the United States at any point between 1980 and 2012, with a POD after 1972.
  5. MrP

    AH Challenge: Earth-sheltered buildings more widespread

    Earth-sheltered buildings have been around since prehistorical times and were independently developed by many different cultures around the world. Yet, in modern times, the practice is quite marginal, despite the well-known advantages of using earth for thermal insulation. Can anyone...
  6. MrP

    WI: A National Homeland for the Roma?

    One of the persecuted minorities in Nazi-occupied Europe was the Roma, who like the Jews were slated for outright extermination. But whereas the Jews eventually got a national homeland, the Roma remained stateless. They face various forms of discrimination in several European countries to this...
  7. MrP

    What if the Latinisation of USSR languages had been completed?

    In the 1920s and early 1930s, the Soviet regime engaged in a policy of replacing preexisting scripts with the Latin alphabet. By the mid-1930s, nearly 50 of the USSR's 72 written languages were Latinised, and preliminary work was underway to convert Russian and Ukrainian themselves from the...
  8. MrP

    What would be the national anthem of an independent Quebec?

    Let us say that either the 1980 referendum or, more plausibly, the 1995 referendum results in a majority in favour of sovereignty for Quebec. Leaving aside more substantive political and economic issues, my question is, what national anthem would it choose for itself?
  9. MrP

    With Iron and Fire (A Reboot of Superpower Empire: China 1912)

    With his TL soon to be published by Sea Lion Press, Hendryk has requested that it be rebooted here at AH.com where it all started. Let's begin with something that was never posted before--the actual POD: CHINA PRESIDENT-ELECT YUAN SHIH-KAI DEAD ------------------------- HAD YET TO BE...
  10. MrP

    AH Challenge: Keep these 18th century elements of male attire fashionable

    Eighteenth century male fashion involved wigs, makeup, garish colours, silk stockings, crotch-moulding breeches and high heels. Further, in order to be a real man you had to be good at dancing. The challenge is to find a plausible way to retain as many of these items as possible in fashion down...
  11. MrP

    Could the M1941 Johnson have been preferred to the M1 Garand?

    The iconic M1 Garand faced some competition prior to its adoption as the standard service rifle of the US armed forces. Could the also-ran M1941 Johnson have been picked instead? According to Wikipedia: Since Johnson had also designed a light machine gun which shared the same operating...
  12. MrP

    Plausibility Check: V-1 Flying Bombs used in Anti-Aircraft role

    In the course of WW2, the Germans came up with several prototypes for a surface-to-air guided missile: the Enzian, the Wasserfall, the Schmetterling and others. But all ran into development problems and couldn't be deployed operationally. Could the V-1 have been used in such a role without...
  13. MrP

    Teardrops on Wheels: WI a different car design becomes popular in the 1930s?

    Most people here have heard of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Car and its revolutionary layout. Interestingly, other carmakers in the 1930s independently came up with comparable designs: the Stout Scarab in the US, the Crossley Streamline in the UK, and the Tatra 87 in Csechoslovakia. Aside from...
  14. MrP

    WI no Farewell source: 1980s Soviet industrial spy operations not compromised?

    At the height of the Second Cold War, the Soviet capability to steal technology from the West was critically compromised by a KGB defector, who gave French counter-intelligence services extensive information on Soviet industrial espionage operations in Western countries. The information was...
  15. MrP

    The Free City of Memel, a Hong Kong of the Baltic?

    Memel (a.k.a. Klaipeda) is a formerly German city on the Baltic that, after WW1, became a French protectorate, with the ultimate goal of granting it the same status of free city as Danzig. In OTL it was annexed by Lithuania in 1923, reclaimed by Germany in 1939, and returned to the Lithuanian...
  16. MrP

    WI Franklin's Phonetic Alphabet had been adopted for American English?

    Among Benjamin Franklin's many interests was spelling reform, and in 1768, while in London, he designed a phonetic alphabet for English that did away with six letters he considered redundant (c, j, q, w, x, and y) and replaced them with new ones. What if, in the wake of independence, the...
  17. MrP

    AH Challenge: Capybaras an invasive species

    In the past half-millennium, a number of animal and plant species have been introduced either deliberately (rabbits, cane toads, kudzu) or unwittingly (rats, green crabs) in biotopes where they proliferated and became pests. This challenge is about adding capybaras to the list. By whatever...
  18. MrP

    AH Challenge: Alaska a Majority-Minority State

    (I'm putting this here because I assume a pre-1900 POD is easier, but the later the better--your call). Alaska and Hawaii were the last two states admitted into the Union. I'd like to see how it would be possible to make the former's demographics similar to the latter in terms of Whites being...
  19. MrP

    WW2 delayed or preempted: How does the USSR turn out?

    This is a question that has been on my mind ever since I read Spufford's Red Plenty, the tale of how the Soviet command economy tried and failed to keep the promise of abundance for all. The first two Five-Year Plans created tremendous social and economic dislocation in the USSR--famine...
  20. MrP

    Plausibility Check: Rocket-boosted earthquake bombs in WW2

    Earthquake bombs were one of the inventions of Barnes Wallis, who sought to design ordnance that would only explode after penetrating some distance into the ground--the resulting explosion would create shockwaves similar in effect to a limited earthquake. The main hurdle was that in order to...
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