Blank canvass periods of history

I was reading Lies My Teacher Told Me awhile back and this quote struck me:
The technology and culture of Indians on America's east coast were genuine rivals to those of the English, and the eventual outcome of the rivalry was not at first clear. . . , One can only speculate what the outcome of the rivalry would have been if the impact of European diseases on the American population had not been so devastating. If colonists had not been able to occupy lands already cleared by Indian farmers who had vanished, colonization would have proceeded much more slowly. If Indian culture had not been devastated by the physical and psychological assaults it had suffered, colonization might not have proceeded at all.
So that actually piqued some intrigue. The book is rather anti-Eurocentric, and also about a decade old, so I wouldn't be surprised if this consensus changed by now; the ideas of former paragraphs mentioned the idea that Africa and Asia were "dominated but not settled," and implied that without the plagues that killed many Natives, that America would be something more like Africa or Asia. This really makes me curious.
 
This isn't a TL as much as it is a general discussion of pre 1900 AH(or some periods therof.

Anyway certain historical events, regions, and patterns had such a great impact having them not happen would dramatically change how history proceeded.

One example is no Islam-Islam's impact on history is hard to understate and having no Islam means the writer of a TL is free to basically use their imagination after a maybe a century of extrapolating.

And that is what a lot of TLs are-extrapolations, research, and imagination.

What other periods, events, personas, and patterns if changed or butterflied away would have a similar impact-meaning that writing about the lack of them is very hard after a maybe a century of "well things were going in this direction so this is reasonable".

Thoughts?

Sengoku wise, take your pick. My TL aside, with any PoD anything can happen, which can lead to any number of different Japans. If not in the makeup of which clans actually power than in how Japan may end up as a whole overall. Does a surviving Oda consolidate Japan and keep it open, can Hideyoshi Ensure the Toyotomi survive after his death? Those are PoD's which have very radical implications for Japan.

I was reading Lies My Teacher Told Me awhile back and this quote struck me:

So that actually piqued some intrigue. The book is rather anti-Eurocentric, and also about a decade old, so I wouldn't be surprised if this consensus changed by now; the ideas of former paragraphs mentioned the idea that Africa and Asia were "dominated but not settled," and implied that without the plagues that killed many Natives, that America would be something more like Africa or Asia. This really makes me curious.

Read the Sulking Way of War if you get a chance, it elaborates on this point, that the Native Americans could match and even at one point outmatched the Europeans. Like the Aztec Conquests without any guides, European colonialism would be completely different.
 
Read the Sulking Way of War if you get a chance, it elaborates on this point, that the Native Americans could match and even at one point outmatched the Europeans. Like the Aztec Conquests without any guides, European colonialism would be completely different.
I might if I remember in the future!!
Quick idea on how to keep the Natives immune: some wayward Roman ship lands in the Americas before the common era. The ship establishes Old World diseases into the New World. Reminds me of a timeline idea I had ages ago - one where Rome placed a trade city in Central America, spreading livestock into the New World, and diseases. These livestock and horse populations adapt into North America, and the Natives gain immunity before Columbus, the Norse, the Mali, and whoever you want to believe touched foot in the Americas before or during that period of time.
 
The best way to get Native immunity is the Norse for me—if they’d just stuck around for a few more decades and done more trading they could’ve easily sparked off the waves of disease necessary to get the ball rolling (that sounds horrible :-( out of context)
 
That’s not really the way immunity works. The best way to get natives immune is to have them domesticate animals and begin to organize into larger urban units.

Either way, I’m always somewhat skeptical of claims of the east coast native americans being on a similar level to the europeans. Perhaps the Inca or the Aztecs could have that claim made about them, but organizationally certainly the algonquin tribes had nowhere near the capacity to challenge even early Massachusetts. They lacked metal working, advanced crafts and large scale farming.
 
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