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The normal, non-italicized font is easier to read for larger updates like the last one. And yes, Lodge was an absolute disaster. Don't get me wrong, Wilson botched the hell out of the League of Nations negotiations (inviting a token Republican to go with him to Versailles would have smoothed a lot of feathers but Wilson was nothing if not headstrong and stubborn) but Lodge was a special combination of short-sighted and obstinate in his own right.

Always struck me as a bit sad that very few of the architects of WWI and the Paris Peace Process died before they could see the complete failures their efforts caused. Lodge, Wilson, Clemenceau, Ludendorff, Hindenberg, Foch and many more all died before they could see WWII. Would have been more fitting if they were still alive to see how completely and utterly they screwed up. But, as is usually the case, it is the next generation who has to clean up the messes of the past generation.

Love how the Liberals are basically knifing each other in the dark...yet they'll still win the Presidency and Senate in 1900 and dominate politics until at least 1920 🙄🙄

Anyway, speaking of crusty, long-tenured, turn of the century politicians...what's Uncle Joe Cannon up to?
Glad it’s easier to read! Feeling good about the formatting change even if it’ll take some getting used to.

Cannon is working his way up House leadership but is not on my list of future Speakers, so he’s ATM just a powerful Illinois Liberal
 
Suffragette Sisterhood
"...1900 delivered more wins to the suffragettes of the United States as both Oregon and Montana passed bills expanding the franchise to women, and once again revealing the deeply polarized politics on the issue between state legislators of the West and of the East (and not just on the issue of suffrage - Oregon in the same year became the first state to pass strongly prohibitionist legislation while also mandating intraparty primaries for Senate candidates that the legislature would be bound by [1] and abolishing ward elections in Portland and Salem). Four states and three territories now allowed the women's vote for all elections, local, state or federal; the momentum seemed to be building to seek the big prize, the Western heavyweight of California, next.

The twin victories of 1900 and growing suffragette chapters on the East Coast (New York City's March for Suffrage would be larger than the previous year's by nearly 50%) overshadowed the fact that winning the franchise was as of yet still a campaign only tasting victory in the New World. In Europe, more conservative societies rigidly refused to countenance such a thing, even in local or indirect balloting; in the continent's largest democracy, the radicalism of Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain - who had delivered universal male suffrage just five years earlier - such a matter was dismissed out of hand. It was for that reason that while the suffrage movement was often fiery and fierce in the United States, it rarely if ever turned violent, compared to the rising number of bombings carried out by fringe suffragettes in London to bring attention to their cause..." [2]

- Suffragette Sisterhood

[1] So if a Democratic legislature is in office, they're bound by whoever won the Democratic primary contest, since the way I wove that into the narrative isn't super clear. They're not bound by a *statewide* choice independent of party; direct elections haven't quite gotten the push they need... yet.
[2] This is, believe it or not, true. The more mainstream women's rights orgs in the UK pushing for suffrage within the system were not amused.
 
Engines of Industry: The Capitalist Innovation of the Second Industrial Revolution
"...his personal fame and, by this point, fortune was too great for Westinghouse to realistically keep him, even with an offer of a substantial share of the company's stock and being firmly in the line of succession. Tesla politely declined; he had come to America as much for the opportunity as for the adventure, and in starting Tesla Electric Manufacturing Enterprises he was seeking both. He liquidated most of his already-considerable Westinghouse Company stock with his broker in New York in March of 1900 and set out into the west, like so many immigrants before him.

This, it may be said, was probably his first mistake as an independent businessman. [1] He arrived in Colorado Springs and established his laboratory there, hoping to use the peace and quiet it afforded him as well as ample land for his experiments. The trouble, of course, was that the nearest big city of Denver was no New York; his business was dependent on investors who were quite reluctant to journey all the way out to an isolated town off the Western Pacific mainline just to see whatever new innovation Tesla had cooked up. The Colorado sojourn would in the end be brief, yield few major breakthroughs, and ended when investors who controlled the majority of his firm began asking questions and he was compelled to return to New York..."

- Engines of Industry: The Capitalist Innovation of the Second Industrial Revolution

[1] Nikola Tesla - brilliant inventor, shit entrepreneur.
 
Maximilian of Mexico
"...the new century brought with it a new paradigm in Mexican politics, and that was the exit of longstanding conservatives in good-standing who preceded Maximilian as national figures and could reasonably expected to have their own base of power independent of the Emperor. This suited Maximilian just fine; he had already begun dreaming of a more constitutionally sound system to build upon the reforms delivered by Zuloaga fifteen years earlier and with personalities like Miramon riding off into the sunset, he was ready to devolve more power to the Assembly away from the Chapultepec.

Of course, that manifested itself in curious way. Forty years of stability and institutional maturity within what could once reasonably be described as a rubber stamp council with too many members when the vote was always going to be "Si", had delivered an Assembly that was also much more sure of itself and its position in the Mexican system. Indeed, even Miramon - a living god to many Mexican conservatives, particularly in urban areas - had sparred with the landed wing of the Union Popular (that in his view was supposed to exist largely to further his ambitions, rather than the other way around) in his eight-year Premiership. So in a stroke of immense and in the end fateful irony Maximilian deciding to start the process of finding a new Prime Minister by consulting the Assembly, as was the fashion in constitutional monarchies, yielded a result that made him balk.

Miramon, despite not particularly liking Jose Yves Limantour, had endorsed the long-serving Finance Minister as his successor purely out of inertia and his competence. Maximilian quite liked Limantour for his part and was hoping that the Assembly was in-line with the departing Prime Minister and would tell the Chapultepec what he wanted to hear. He was shocked over a cool January lunch, then, when several key leaders of the UP - most importantly Enrique Creel, Pablo Macedo and Antonio Hernandez - informed him that the Assembly's preference was Joaquin Baranda, the Foreign Minister, or at least the Assembly's leadership.

In practice, there was not much difference between Limantour and Baranda. Both were conservative-liberal technocrats unfailingly loyal to the Empire, both were in good standing with the emerging urban bourgeois consensus, and both were well-regarded at their current ministries. What made Maximilian hesitate, however, was Baranda's well-known antipathy to the United States, which was a problem with the emerging economic and political ties between Mexico City and Washington. Baranda, like his ally Creel and many key landowners, held to a belief that the rapid and seemingly unstoppable rise of the United States would soon economically and in time culturally swamp the whole of the Americas and effectively vassalize Mexico; his geopolitical worldview instead endorsed a "Bloc of the South" that would partner with states such as Brazil, the Confederate States and Chile to check US ambitions as a unified group.

Maximilian rather feared that more belligerent members of this hypothetical Bloc Sud - namely, the Confederacy or Chile, both of which had fought wars with the United States more recently than Mexico had - would drag Mexico into a position of rivalry or aggression where instead his liberal instincts (and, it should be said, Amerophile admiration for capitalism, education and republican constitutional democracy) called for partnership. He politely thanked the Upistas for their thoughts and two days later went with his preference and called Limantour to the Chapultepec to be named Prime Minister. Maximilian, at least for the time being, was still more of a regular monarch than the constitutional kind..."

- Maximilian of Mexico
 
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The World in 1900 - Map
1900 QBAM CdM 25.jpg

This is a map I just threw together of the world as of 1900 in Cinco de Mayo. It's a bit sloppy but I rather like it personally. One can see the Confederacy on here, the colonies various European powers still hold, the Wanked Ottomans, German Luxembourg and French Alsace, as well as independent Madagascar and Cambodia.

I used the 1900 OTL base that @Crazy Boris made in the QBAM resource thread as my jumping off point.

The site wouldn't let me load anything bigger than this 0.25MB jpeg so sorry for the low quality.
 
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Land of the Morning Calm: Korea's 20th Century
"...anything other than a rousing success. Min, for her part, took tremendous pride of the "Korean way," what she described to her close circle as a middle path between the breakneck Westernization of Japan in the Meiji Era and the fiercely conservative Qing Chinese reaction against the fairly modest Western reforms, much as Korea was in the middle between those two larger historical powers that had contested one another for influence on the peninsula.

With the old pro-Chinese conservative element largely broken over the last fifteen years, Kim Hong-jip was the ideal administrator for such a project; he was an admirer of the exiled Chinese intellectual Kang Youwei, who had tried but failed to marry Western concepts to Chinese society to reinvigorate the crumbling Empire, but what did not work in Peking could perhaps work in Seoul [1]. The process was distinctly of the Joseon civilization; on the one hand, the King Gojong began wearing Western-style military uniforms when in court and his advisers suits bought from American tailors, but they all still wore the traditional topknots. Lessons at the hundreds of schools and academies that sprung up across Korea were largely taught in native Korean and, for the first time, attempted to teach the Hangul script rather than the traditional Chinese Hanja. Unlike just over the Yalu, where missionaries and Christians were burned alive or crucified by the rampaging Boxer societies, religious tolerance was encouraged and demanded by Court, and only Catholic churches - invariably sponsored and staffed by French - gave sermons in anything other than Korean. Min, though remaining Buddhist, was particularly proud of the Hangul Bible she was given as a gift by her good friend, the American Methodist missionary and Ehwa's founder, Mary Scranton.

Americans were perhaps the foreigners who held the most prestige in Korea, and that was in large part because they meddled little in the kingdom's internal affairs despite leasing their key Asian naval harbor at Port Hamilton between the mainland and Jeju [2]. Merchants stayed mostly in the foreign legations of Inchon, Kaesong and Seoul, military advisers brought with them loads of Winchesters and Remingtons for the burgeoning Royal Korean Army to drill with, while missionaries became key parts of their communities. Russians, too, were held in good esteem, for similar reasons; provided Korea was nominally "neutral" and did not provide an avenue for any other power to threaten St. Petersburg's precious railroad concessions in Manchuria, and every winter allowed the Pacific Fleet to harbor in the mouth of the Taedong off Nampo while Vladivostok was frozen over, the Tsar and his ministers made no substantial demands, and the few Orthodox missionaries who did trek to the peninsula were rarely seen or thought of outside of Hamgyong Province. [3]

Koreans had thus long since forgotten the brief gunboat incident at Ganghwa Island with the Americans over thirty years prior; they had not, on the other hand, forgotten the various Japanese and French invasions or intrigues (most famously France's treatment of Korea as a mere additional theater in their war with China in 1884), or the fact that those two nations had carved out treaty ports which were effectively their exclaves in Wonsan and Pusan, respectively, and citizens of both enjoyed near-total extraterritorial rights throughout the peninsula, a privilege not shared by any other foreigner. Japan had long sought to bully Korea, continued to scheme against it and pro-Japanese instigators opposed to the royal couple such as Kim Ok-gyun remained in Tokyo, alongside republican revolutionaries in that same city who were in exile and inspired by the Han Chinese Tongmenhui that sought a progressive democratic republic in the place of the decaying Qing. France, for its part, still regarded Korea as a pseudo-protectorate and semi-vassal despite the changing circumstances on the ground there; the French, thus, were particularly disliked, despite Catholicism now being increasingly influential on the peninsula, particularly in Pyongyang, the so-called "Jerusalem of the Orient"..."

- Land of the Morning Calm: Korea's 20th Century

[1] My Korean history is based entirely around Wiki-ing all these people I'm mentioning in said updates; if anyone knows when, precisely, did "Hanseong" become "Seoul," and why? Was it a Korean endeavor? How late did it carry the name Hanseong? I've been using Seoul since the 1860s but I wonder if that's correct.
[2] It kind of amazes how strategic Port Hamilton was at one point considered; those islands are tiny!
[3] Russian Orthodoxy of course had a pretty limited proselytizing component outside of formally Russian territories (and even then; see Central Asia). They didn't penetrate Alaska much either when it was theirs.

(All in all, Korea can be considered to be undergoing a "soft" or "partial" Meiji here; not nearly to Japan's extent, but much more so than even pre-Tiananmen Coup China and much more than what Korea did OTL. The French forced opening in 1869 and then the gradual withdrawal of Chinese/conservative influence and Min being able to pursue her preferred reforms without Japanese shenanigans puts the not-so-Hermit Kingdom in a substantively better position than they were comparatively in 1900 OTL)
 
Faultlines: The Complicated History of Canada's Ethnic Tensions
"...a project that did not obviously come easily. The "Mowat Majority" (a term coined by the precocious Prime Minister to avoid accusation that Laurier was the true power in government) had solved the Manitoba Schools Question with a workable compromise that settled all parties in the province [1], passed a law to end the badly malapportioned ridings throughout Canada once the 1901 census came about, and invested massively in the Permanent Active Militia's Royal Canadian Regiment, more than doubling its size, boosting the pay of its officers and enlisted men, and opening a small auxiliary staff school to avoid having to send staff officers to Sandhurst and allow their biannual education and cooperation on home soil. The Mowat government was also, compared to big-tent Liberal regimes in other Anglosphere countries such as the United States, fiercely federalist and emphasized her relations with the provincial governments. This was out of two reasons; the traditional Tory centralism that prioritized order and loyalty from Ottawa on down (what Laurier dismissively quipped as "the Great Orange Lodge of Ottawa"), and the resulting tensions between the government and Quebec in particular, but also the West. A federalist Canada, in the Mowat government's view, better aligned with the "peculiar needs" of the mosaic of communities within the state, and better served a national interest and their vision of a genuine Canadian nationhood.

Of course, Mowat and his ministry would soon be challenged not from within but from storm clouds over the Pacific; an international crisis that would raise questions about the role of Britain's Empire, and Canada's part to play within it..."

- Faultlines: The Complicated History of Canada's Ethnic Tensions

[1] Same workaround Laurier found OTL, basically saying if enough French students warranted their own school in a community the government would pay for it, but not otherwise.
 
I just realized I completely forgot to pick a husband for Max’s daughter, Maria Carlota, six or seven years after she took off to Europe to find one 🤦‍♂️ The downsides of having 40,001 characters to juggle!
 
I just realized I completely forgot to pick a husband for Max’s daughter, Maria Carlota, six or seven years after she took off to Europe to find one 🤦‍♂️ The downsides of having 40,001 characters to juggle!
What about any Brazilian ones? I remember an unsuccessful attemp in TTL, but there is nothing to lose to try again.
 
What about any Brazilian ones? I remember an unsuccessful attemp in TTL, but there is nothing to lose to try again.
Yeah, the now-deceased Pedro III did… not impress Max.

I’m going to take a look at the various Bavarians/minor Habsburgs maybe there’s something promising there haha
 
There's gotta be some Catholic Central European we can play matchmaker with. Maybe Franz Ferdinand has a cousin or something.
Did his brother Ferdinand Karl (aka Ferdinand Burg) ever marry? 🤔 we know the Habsburgs love cousin-marriage after all! (“Eyepatch” Louis Maximilian married a distant Hungarian one after all!)
 
What about an Italian? They're certainly Catholic enough.

Did Maria Pia (Umberto's sister) marry the King of Portugal ITTL?

Edit: She's pretty old. Maybe if she and the King of Portugal have a daughter around 1870 our guy could marry her?
 
What about an Italian? They're certainly Catholic enough.

Did Maria Pia (Umberto's sister) marry the King of Portugal ITTL?

Edit: She's pretty old. Maybe if she and the King of Portugal have a daughter around 1870 our guy could marry her?
I think you may have unlocked the answer!

Infante Afonso (Maria Pia’s second son) could actually be a good fit; not an heir (so would deign to marry a *gasp* Mexican princess), but not married until the 1910s in real life and would strategically be a good match for Maria Carlota by giving Mexico a foothold somewhere other than just her cousins either in Vienna or Brussels
 
I think you may have unlocked the answer!

Infante Afonso (Maria Pia’s second son) could actually be a good fit; not an heir (so would deign to marry a *gasp* Mexican princess), but not married until the 1910s in real life and would strategically be a good match for Maria Carlota by giving Mexico a foothold somewhere other than just her cousins either in Vienna or Brussels
I think that could work. Catholic and noble while not being powerful enough to actually matter in the geopolitical game.
 
The Revolution Sleeps
"...Boulanger made his impact known quick, in some ways more beneficial to the Tuileries than others. Even after barely over a year on the job, he was dominating the Cabinet like Bazaine was back from the dead, only he held a formal title with real constitutional power rather than just the vague, handshake carte blanche Napoleon IV had granted his father's old hatchet man and enforcer. Boulanger made his contempt for "subversion" known early with his enthusiastic endorsement of the Marquis de Galliffet, 69 years young upon his appointment, to be his successor as Minister of War and thus keeping the Army tightly in control of the ostensibly civilian ministry meant to control it. Galliffet, of course, was famed as the general who had led Marshal MacMahon's charge to crush the Commune 30 years prior, and earned the sobriquet Le Fusilier for his actions; regime skeptics in the Imperial Assembly were shocked that Napoleon IV did not push back more readily on the choice.

But the choice, in the end, was up to the Emperor still and not his mercurial Prime Minister, which Boulanger of course understood and in many ways readily accepted; boundlessly ambitious as he was, his loyalty first and foremost lay in the institution of the Crown and he in many ways viewed his own career advancement as a vessel for the defense of the monarchy, surmising that the Emperor twenty years his junior oft needed a "firm hand to steer the carriage as he waves to the masses." This attitude suggests why he accepted Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau as Foreign Minister in early 1900, shortly before the opening of the Paris Olympics, with little fuss, despite the latter's father having served as one of the fiercest republican opponents of the coup in 1848 that brought the Bonapartes back to power. Whatever his own misgivings of the Waldeck-Rousseaus (and there were many; Boulanger suspected his Foreign Minister of never truly having shed his republican sympathies, despite his now-lengthy career of conservative politics and moderate support for the regime) [1] Boulanger expressed them privately to the Emperor and that was the end of it, though he frequently boxed him out of key decisions and continued to act as a shadow chief diplomat in the vein of a Talleyrand, Metternich or Bismarck until Waldeck-Rousseau passed away in 1904. This accommodationist line was popular within a Cabinet that, to the surprise of many, lacked the gamesmanship its various peers had come to expect of the fiery Marshal, but alienated Boulanger from many of his longtime supporters within the Ligue des Patriotes, who wanted any sniff of republicanism driven out of the government entirely and for their champion to take a much more reactionary line, and indeed fringe figures within the Ligue began to push for a platform that divorced itself from the monarchist or republican question entirely to center itself entirely on French nationalist and Catholic chauvinism [2]..."

- The Revolution Sleeps

[1] My thinking here: whatever republicanism many Frenchmen would have held, a whole chunk of the Opportunists of OTL, especially the ones more to the right like Faure or Waldeck-Rousseau, probably would have been able to read the writing on the wall and just accept the liberal-conservative moderation of Nappy 4 and take his limited constitutional framework as a win and move on with their lives. People in politics are, inherently, pragmatic, even in a society as passionate about political minutiae as the French Third Republic of OTL
[2] Many of you will probably recognize the names that will appear when this starts to become important.
 
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