Affiliated States of Boreoamerica thread
- Thread starter False Dmitri
- Start date
Was there a St. Pierre somewhere on the map? That was another of the forts established by the French in North America IOTL.
Hello from Quarantine! To explain my long absence, I moved at the end of January. The desktop computer where I do all my maps and such got packed into boxes. And there it remains, since in the new place I still don't have a desk. I didn't feel right using a laptop from work to do alternate history, but hey, now we're all in Quarantine. I assume workplaces everywhere are going to be pretty lenient about how we use these things.
I love that the world of the ASB has just continued to grow without me, that it doesn't need me to flourish. I'll be brushing up on what I missed and try not to get in the way of it. For now I'm just responding to the Polandball comics.
Thanks so much. All the comics you've created are a joy. The only thing I'd change is using "Yankee" to describe Pennsylvania and the other middle-latitude states. Yankee in TTL is synonymous with New Englander. I don't know what other term would work for that panel ... OTL linguists use the term "Midland" for a similar region, that might work in a pinch.
They'd be called a Pennamite. (The term Pennsylvanian also exists, and it's more of a civic term, while Pennamite is more of an ethno-cultural term.) I'm searching for a term that could cover the English of Pennsylvania, Christiana, and the inland territories that they influenced.
Gian
Banned
Oh hi @False Dmitri.
I'm sure you've heard of this map I'm making, right:
I will ofc need a list of cities at least for Illinois and Ohio (and maybe HL, Dakota, and the Civilized Tribal states) because I use this as a basemap to place all the cities with.
I'm sure you've heard of this map I'm making, right:
I will ofc need a list of cities at least for Illinois and Ohio (and maybe HL, Dakota, and the Civilized Tribal states) because I use this as a basemap to place all the cities with.
That stems from the separate out-of-universe origin of the Imperial Commonwealth: as an unapologetic Russo-wank in which the tsars more-or-less continued to rule every bit of territory they ever held or dreamed of holding. With no regard to the historic contexts of the various parts of it. It was only later that I decided to graft this contraption to the ASB, which was similar, except that instead of a wank of a single power it was an ahistorical mishmash of interesting blended North American cultures. So why does the Commonwealth include Thrace and Constantinople? The simple, out-of-universe answer is that ruling it was the dream of many generations of tsars, and no proper Russo-wank would be complete without it.
Just like with the ASB itself, developing the Imperial Commonwealth has meant fleshing out the unrealistic givens of the scenario to create something plausible. Russian history has been brought up to the start of the reign of Dmitri I and VI, who ruled 1762-1802. We know that the empire pushed into a lot of new regions during that era, including Crimea, Manchuria, the Pacific, and inland North America. The major wars at the end of this reign and the start of the subsequent one were probably the time when Russia entered the Mediterranean. The Heptanese is a deliberate echo of the Septinsular Republic that Russia sponsored during the Napoleonic Wars of our timeline.
Clearly Russian control of the city would have major effects on the balance of power in the region; and the balance of forces within the city and state itself would also be always delicate and fraught. Clearly the Ottoman state has collapsed in order to make such a thing possible; that's something that has yet to be written. It's reasonable to suppose that Russian control in Thrace was accomplished via indirect rule. The key events were different from in OTL, because the key figures and the wider context were not the same.
This fits in perfectly, if you ask me. A Salt Lake that avoids the cliche of "Yet Another Mormon State." For what it's worth, the Mormon presence in the region is negligible - their main area of settlement was along the Missouri River.
This is an impressive piece of work. The numbers work out very nicely, and I especially like the fact that English is the top native language but French is the top language when you add L1 and L2 speakers together.
I never got to my third language post, which will be about the remaining European languages. I know there must be a term for the smaller but well-established European languages, but I never picked one. German, Swedish, Scots and Gaelic stand out as having official status in at least one state. Given that, it would seem odd to classify them as "foreign," at least officially - though they might be considered as such outside the areas where they are spoken. Welsh and Irish are similar in that they are spoken in very long-established communities, though nowadays only in a couple of very remote pockets. Portuguese and Italian, by contrast, would be fairly classified as "old immigrant" languages.
My fourth planned language post will indeed center on Creole languages, agreeing with Venusian Si. I don't think they would require changing your numbers necessarily - most studies historically would indeed have counted creole speakers as belonging to their respective colonial language. And in reality creoles and colonial languages form a continuum; a speaker when asked which language they use might not be able to give a simple answer. Creoles certainly play a role in the ASB that's different from most contexts that we know from our timeline, and clarifying their status will take some further storytelling, I think.
We've tiptoed around this topic before. If you have solid ideas about modern-day immigration to the ASB, feel free to share! It appears that a good deal of immigration is from the North American family of nations, which is of course a natural place to look first.
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Nothing, I'm sorry to say. Since I last posted I've had some major changes in my personal, family and work life, and I haven't been able to cook up much.
The most up-to-date Worlda is from last November. It's incomplete, simply because nobody knows what's in the blank parts of the world as of yet.
I've been working on this bit little by little, although I've been somewhat avoiding the new-world nations because I'm still not sure about the status of South America.
That's certainly something I can help with. For Ohio, there indeed are maps with town names. They're generally historic maps rather than contemporary ones, but the principal towns from that era have endured as centers of government and settlement. This is the only one I have access to at the moment, but it can be a starting point.
Here are some towns that remained important down to the present day. I'll give their locations with reference to towns on your basemap.
- Vincennes (capital of its eponymous province): Same as Vincennes, Indiana
- Ouiatenon (capital of Wea province): Lafayette, Indiana
- Mississinewa (capital of Upper Wabash province): a bit to the east of Logansport, Indiana
- Pekoui (state capita): a bit south of Sidney, Ohio
- Losanville (capital of Losanti province): Cincinnati
- Chalacatha (capital of its eponymous province): Chillicothe, Ohio
- Coshocton (capital of East Muskingum province): Coshocton, Ohio
- Greathouse (capital of The Ranges province): Marietta, Ohio
- Youngstown (capital of its eponymous province): Same as Youngstown, Ohio
- Gnadenburg (capital of Mühlenberg province): On the basemap, it's right by the "u" in Pittsburgh, and pretty much right where the Ohio-Pennsylvania border crosses the Ohio River.
- North Fork (capital of Forks province): the western part of Pittsburgh, in the pocket between the Ohio and Allegheny Rivers
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Well the map, at least, is mostly filled in. The list of countries, from the wiki, is:
- Dutch Suriname
- Republic of New Torarica: Jewish-dominated state in Suriname's interior
- Kingdom of New Providence: English dominion roughly occupying the space of OTL French Guiana
- New Tuscany / Nuova Toscana: Former Italian colony in the Guyanas whose precise borders are not decided yet
- Klein-Venedig: former German colony to the west of New Tuscany
- Amazonian Confederation: small federal state on the lower Amazon, a union of former colonies that were established along the river
- New Holland: descendant of Dutch Brazil, occupying the coast roughly from Maceió to Belém
- Brazil
- Peru: Much larger than in OTL, including the territory of Bolivia and Ecuador and much of Chile
- Paraguay
- Argentina
- Unnamed former French penal colony in mid-latitude Chile
- Patagonia: conquered by France in the Napoleonic era
- Chiloé island
- New Cymru: Welsh-speaking state at the southern tip of the continent
- Falkland: colony of New England
The only totally blank spot left is roughly the area of Colombia. Either way, I would expect South American immigration to be rather less than immigration from other, closer parts of North America that the ASB has much closer interactions with.
ST15RM
Banned
so i know i haven't done a lot on this thread, but i might as well jump in with my ideas from the middle east. i haven't fully fleshed out any countries yet but here's my general ideas
- ottoman empire does gain control over middle east but soon falls apart
- arab states form without european influence but ally with other nations
- oman, najd and persia are more powerful states and persia is an ally to the russo-swedish-polish mega-monarchy.
but i still haven't made up my mind. so, thoughts?