Cinco de Mayo

[KingSweden24]

"...Yohannes' army crushed and scattered the Mahdists, effectively ending the movement once and for all at Gallabat and pushing Ethiopia's hegemony even further north. [1] Of course, this strategic triumph by the modern Ethiopian state brought with it complications in the ever-moving game of European intrigues in Africa; Yohannes' understanding with the French and the Ottomans to allow Egyptian and French Foreign Legion movement through his territory as needed, and support against the Mahdists, had thus come to an end, as it was never a formal treaty. The French attention to Ethiopia thus declined, though trade continued to flourish through French Somaliland, and Yohannes was frustrated that he would not receive outright support for retaking the city of Massawa from Italian hands after he finally put an end to insurrections against his rule that had been delayed only due to the Mahdist sack of Gondar..."

- The African Game: The European Contest for the Dark Continent

[1] OTL, of course, Yohannes died in this battle and thus the Mahdists routed his army

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the inauguration was a grand affair, in which Custer rode in to Washington in steady rainfall at the head of a parade on his horse, with Libby on her own mount, rather than in a carriage with his predecessor as was previously convention (Hill, of course, begrudgingly rode in a covered carriage with Acting President Ingalls). Two nights of fireworks displays lit up the Potomac both before and after the festivities, and balls lasted deep into the night as Democrats celebrated having taken the keys to the White House, back in what they considered their rightful hands, as stewards of the needs of the common man. Custer's rain-soaked address was, to the surprise of nobody, short and curt, extolling the once-again peaceful transfer of power, the virtues of American democracy, and called upon "a great collaboration of our industrial concerns and the labor on which they rely," the first acknowledgement to the labor movement by a President in such a formal setting. At the end of his address, Custer concluded, "And may I thank the most dignified gentleman from Kansas, a state for which I hold much love, for his careful stewardship of our nation in the last trying year of our history, with no concern for his own vanities or ambitions, a man who placed the Republic first and who still had the humility to stand here and hold his umbrella over me as I spoke. Mr. Ingalls, sir - I, Libby, and all your fellow countrymen are forever indebted to you for your conduct." Ingalls would later have a copy of that speech, and its coda, signed by Custer and framed in his home.

Custer got to work quickly putting his Cabinet in place, leaning heavily on experienced hands from across the nation to staff his government. For the most critical role, that of Secretary of State, he invited into government the Democratic party's elder statesman, Thomas Bayard of Delaware; as Attorney General, the well-regarded Judson Harmon of Ohio; at Interior, former Senator Samuel Beach Axtell of New Mexico; at Treasury he selected Charles Fairchild, a Hill loyalist from New York nevertheless known for his integrity; to the Navy, he appointed William Charles Whitney, a conservative New England reformer; and as Secretary of War, he elected to entrust with his project to reinvigorate the Army an ally from Michigan, Congressman Melbourne Haddock Ford..."

- The Wolverine in the White House: The Presidency of George Armstrong Custer at 100

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the centennials of the Constitution and of George Washington's inauguration were important to both major parties, as well as to the nascent American nationalism that still was bruised by its loss of the South and the muddled results of its two gunboat wars. In Washington, both Liberals and Democrats shared a mutual hero in whom the pride of the Republic could be vested as a singular figure; the centennial of his inauguration was held at Federal Hall in New York, the site of his oath of office. Custer's speech at the event was brief and perfunctory, primarily bromides about what an honor it was to serve as the "Centennial President," and invoking Washington's military legacy (and, thus, attempting to insinuate in his own). Hay, of course, had a different take - his speech rather zeroed in on Washington the man, of how he was an American Cincinnatus, who stood against both rule by the mob and rule by the aristocracy, in refusing a crown and creating the foundational essence of American republicanism. It was lost on no one, especially thus with a view of Custer's grim face, that Hay's denunciation of "rule by demagogy, of whipping up the people against the pillars of society and common institutions, of pitting brother against brother and race against race" was aimed at Democrats in general, and Custer in particular when he continued, "for Washington, the gallant soldier, understood better than any why we must fear the man on the white horse, the self-proclaimed heroes who drape themselves in patriotism earned by blood and scorn the patriotism earned by peaceful toil." The crowd was stunned, that Hay would obliquely attack the newly inaugurated President mere feet away, and at such a solemn occasion, no less. It was understood very much to be the opening salvo in keeping Hay's name in Liberal circles at the tips of their tongues with a view towards 1892..."

- The Cornerstone: John Hay and the Foundation of American Global Prestige

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the Naval Defence Act of 1889 formally adopted the "two-power" standard for the Royal Navy, creating a new building and expansion program over the next five years and up until that point the largest investment in the Navy in British history. The Smith government, and Lord George Hamilton, the First Lord of the Admiralty, understood that the challenges were only accelerating; France had a three-ocean navy that could now project power anywhere on the globe, Germany's cruiser program was passed by the Reichstag in 1889 and the Kiel Canal was but years from opening, Russia had invested considerably in a naval program and the Black Sea treaties that ended the war with the Ottomans in 1878 were soon set to expire [1], the Ottomans for their part had modernized their fleets over the 1880s as the Balkan industries began to produce, Spain's reach had grown, and the United States was embarking on a massive overhaul of its fleets after conducting two naval wars in the last five years. For Britain to remain the premier sea power, it needed a newer, more modern Navy, and egged on by the Foreign and Colonial offices after the Hamilton Report, it would deliver it..."

- The Age of Questions: Britain in the Gauntlet of Change and Upheaval

[1] Realistically, you can't ban Russia from having a Black Sea fleet forever,

 

[Darth_Kiryan]

"...the centennials of the Constitution and of George Washington's inauguration were important to both major parties, as well as to the nascent American nationalism that still was bruised by its loss of the South and the muddled results of its two gunboat wars. In Washington, both Liberals and Democrats shared a mutual hero in whom the pride of the Republic could be vested as a singular figure; the centennial of his inauguration was held at Federal Hall in New York, the site of his oath of office. Custer's speech at the event was brief and perfunctory, primarily bromides about what an honor it was to serve as the "Centennial President," and invoking Washington's military legacy (and, thus, attempting to insinuate in his own). Hay, of course, had a different take - his speech rather zeroed in on Washington the man, of how he was an American Cincinnatus, who stood against both rule by the mob and rule by the aristocracy, in refusing a crown and creating the foundational essence of American republicanism. It was lost on no one, especially thus with a view of Custer's grim face, that Hay's denunciation of "rule by demagogy, of whipping up the people against the pillars of society and common institutions, of pitting brother against brother and race against race" was aimed at Democrats in general, and Custer in particular when he continued, "for Washington, the gallant soldier, understood better than any why we must fear the man on the white horse, the self-proclaimed heroes who drape themselves in patriotism earned by blood and scorn the patriotism earned by peaceful toil." The crowd was stunned, that Hay would obliquely attack the newly inaugurated President mere feet away, and at such a solemn occasion, no less. It was understood very much to be the opening salvo in keeping Hay's name in Liberal circles at the tips of their tongues with a view towards 1892..."

- The Cornerstone: John Hay and the Foundation of American Global Prestige

Damn. That's not an opening salvo, that's a bloody full broadside attack.

 

[KingSweden24]

Damn. That's not an opening salvo, that's a bloody full broadside attack.

John Hay is not a subtle man!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...for even a master at juggling the balls thrown at him by the various personalities of the Confederate establishment like Lamar could not hold off the rivalries emerging within the Democratic ranks as his Presidency entered its final years. [1] The crux of the split polarized in strange crosswinds, with the fault lines internal and siphoning the Democrats off into factions that did not align cleanly. The older of the splits was between the Conservatives, or Bourbons, led by the Senate Pro Tem Wade Hampton; arrayed against them were the Reformers, who were less organized but came from the growing urban middle and merchant classes as opposed to the planters and cotton brokers who aligned with Hampton, the true power in Richmond and the lord of the Senate. The other split was one based not on internal debates about patronage, infrastructure or which oligarchs would hold sway, but rather the Confederacy's foreign relations, specifically those with the United States. Here, a different split emerged - between the so-called Nationalists, and the so-called Reconcilers. The latter favored closer ties with the Yankees, potentially even eliminating most tariffs with them in a reciprocal treaty; the Nationalists were staunchly opposed to that, and scoffed at deepening diplomatic overtures to any country, for that matter.

The splits were not necessarily clean; a number of Conservatives, Hampton among them, were leading Reconcilers, and enjoyed President Lamar in their number; Vice President Mills was a Conservative and a Nationalist, often leading to disputes with Lamar even though they aligned elsewhere; the prominent Governor of Virginia, Fitzhugh Lee, was himself a Reformer and Nationalist on the issues that came before him. In those years before the Reform League's foundation, when the Reformers were more a scattered lot, these disputes were informal. But the water was beginning to bubble, and the efforts of Lamar, Hampton and others to keep the lid on full-out factionalism from boiling over would soon grow much more difficult..."

- The Revisionism of Reconciliation: The Real History of the Confederate Grand Consensus

[1] We haven't spent much time down in Dixie of late, at least not with its political personalities, but a one-party state with consensus politics just isn't that intriguing IMO

 

[KingSweden24]

Query - is anyone familiar with why New Zealand didn't join Victoria and NSW in forming Australia? We're starting to come up on the point where an independent NZ PoD probably needs to happen, but I've never found any reasoning as to why it wasn't lumped in with the rest of the Oceania colonies when the Confederation of Australia occurred. What am I missing? (Yes, this means I'm leaning towards a combo Australia-NZ dominion)

 

[Electric Monk]

Various reasons, this article seems to sum them all up.

 

[KingSweden24]

Various reasons, this article seems to sum them all up.

Thank you!! I'll take a look at this.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the engineering marvels of the age manifested first in Chicago, home of the first skyscrapers, such as the Home Insurance Building or Tacoma Building, with their new steel structures and use of elevators to transport people rather than arduous stairs. Despite the coming hiccup that would accompany the mass financial panic only a year after the Tacoma's completion, the dawn of a new age beckoned, the first great age of the American skyscraper..."

- A City Made for Liberty: The American Urban Experiment (Chicago School of Architecture, 2009)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Toledo Cathedral, rather than La Almudena, was selected for symbolic reasons for the wedding of "Gilly" and Maria Teresa of Bourbon-Two Sicilies. [1] Leopold saw it as a connection to Spain's glorious past, a towering nave for Europe's royalty to descend upon rather than the unfinished cathedral at the heart of Madrid he had ordered workers to scramble to finish. In the future Queen Maria Teresa, he had found an ideal match for his dutiful heir; she was the daughter of an exiled house in good standing, meaning that the marriage would have no particular complications, she was half-German by way of her Bavarian mother, and she was a Bourbon, bringing that house back into the future Spanish bloodline and cutting off another route for Carlists to lay claim to the throne, diminished as their pretender agitations had become. Though of often frail health, she was beautiful and well liked within the family; "Madi," as her nickname was, spoke perfect German which the royal family continued to insist upon when in private, and entertained both her new in-laws with witticisms and even ribald jokes. Gilly, for his part, adored her; within a year, she would give birth to Augusta Victoria, their first child, and just over a year later their twin boys, Frederick Victor (better known as the future Leopold II) and Francis Joseph, a man of considerable controversy in Spain in his adulthood [2]..."

- The German on the Spanish Throne: The Reign of Leopold I

[1] Also, I just loved Toledo
[2] Note these are indeed the OTL Hohenzollern children born of the marriage of Wilhelm and Maria Teresa; going with their given German names for now, obviously no Spanish monarch is going to go by "Frederico Victor." (I might retcon him to be Victor I of Spain... we'll see. Wilhelm/"Gilly" is going to rule as Carlos I Jose after all, using his middle names as a regnal title because King Guillermo is too Germanic)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Chamberlain was surprised that he was not invited to meet with the new President Custer upon his arrival in the United States, but he nevertheless was able to spend a fair amount of time in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, hobnobbing with the country's elite before his journey to Canada, on the way stopping to dine with luminaries such as former Secretary of State John Hay, whom he had met before in London, as well as former President Abraham Lincoln and the sitting Secretary of State Thomas Bayard, whom he would form a working relationship with years down the line. It was in Canada, though, that Chamberlain was introduced further to the concept of Imperial Federation via former Prime Minister Tupper, who in retirement in Ottawa had turned to that cause as his main focus. It was also in Toronto that Chamberlain for the first time was exposed to the horrific polarization between Protestant and Catholic, seeing Orangeman mobs patrolling neighborhoods in lieu of the Dominion Police, and in Montreal heard the first rumblings of true Quebecois nationalism. The matter impressed upon him the need of more creative solutions in London, and reminded him not of South Africa or Australia, but of his time at Dublin Castle in Ireland..."

- Chamberlain's Britain

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the vast investments in new technologies had a darker side, too. When a remarkably virulent flu strain first emerged in May of 1899 in Bukhara, a pandemic began to move for the first time via rail lines, first to Samarkand, then deeper into Russia. By November, it was in St. Petersburg and Kiev, where as many as 20% of the population was eventually infected - and from there, on to the rest of Europe..."

- The Age of the Railroad

(Author's Note: "Fun" fact, the OTL 1889-90 Russian flu is now thought to potentially have been a cousin variant of Covid-19 that we all know so well thanks to this year. the 1889-90 pandemic will feature prominently in the first chapters of Part V, and the mix of notables whom it takes will be slightly different than OTL's...)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...beneath the stunning achievement of the Tour d'Eiffel, the world's tallest structure, lay the Galerie des Machines, the massive steel and glass that contained industrial displays, and pavilions showcasing French colonies and achievements. The Exposition Universelle attracted as many as 500,000 visitors on its first week, both Parisians who came again and again to marvel at the latest science and technology as well as visitors from all over the world, including notables such as Thomas Edison, Isaac Peral, Alexander Graham Bell and technicians from the Otis Elevator company, displaying the safety of their product that carried visitors up the Eiffel Tower. Many were surprised to see the Imperial family mingling with the crowd those early days, with the Emperor as fascinated by demonstrations of the latest inventions and innovations as his subjects and guests. A fireworks display lit up the Seine every night for the first ten days of Exposition, and military parades on the Champs d'Elysees were held every Saturday. The retired Bismarck, visiting out of curiosity, was said to have remarked to Courbet, his formal host as they looked out from the first viewing deck of the Eiffel Tower, "I thought we had crushed you lot in '67. How wrong I was."..."

- The Eaglet Takes Flight: The Reign of Napoleon IV 1874-1905

(Again, the idea for making the 1889 Exposition Universelle more of a nationalist display by France than OTL's celebration of the Revolution comes in part from the excellent Boulanger Coup timeline)

 

[Darth_Kiryan]

"I thought we had crushed you lot in '67. How wrong I was."..."

What? Bismark thinks he is wrong?

 

[KingSweden24]

What? Bismark thinks he is wrong?

Could be that Courbet just made the whole exchange up!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...though the ULP's success as a standalone party had largely crested with Mayor George's two-year term in office, its impact remained - though infighting would roil the labor movement as the KoL and AFL turned on one another rather than the managerial class, organizing for political action both at the ballot box and in the streets was forever a tool of labor; and with the massive debacle that was the Dudley Affair, the push by labor for the secret ballot was now mainstreamed, nudged along by embarrassed Liberals as it turned into the latest "good government reform" and as sly labor leaders suggested it could be a weapon against the urban immigrant machines that Liberals blamed for delivering Custer the White House. By the 1890 midterms, eight states used the secret ballot; by the 1892 Presidential election, that number had risen to seventeen, and every state in the Union would deploy it by decade's end, even Tammany-run New York after the Fassett Committee temporarily broke the machine [1]..."

- Brothers in Arms: Trade Unionism in the United States

[1] Spoiler!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...French guns, even when silent, spoke loudly; all it took was the Far East Fleet to sail up the Pearl River delta from their base at Port-Napoleon on Hainan and threaten Canton with their cannons for the Qing to back down on the dispute and grant not only even further economic concessions across southern China but give a physical concession of Kuangshowan as well, which Courbet boasted to the Imperial Assembly would "make mockery of Hongkong and Amoy within a decade." France's aggressive, cocky posturing in the Far East did not escape London's attention, nor Berlin's; though muted rivals in the North Sea, Scandinavia and even much of continental Europe, Germany and Britain were aligned in their fears of continuous French dominance in the Orient. When French soldiers started to aggressively probe into the Mekong highlands of Siam with their "Viet sepoys" in tow, it caused tensions to spike not only with Bangkok, which had assumed that its territorial integrity would be respected by all three neighboring European powers, but with Germany, which saw Siam as a partner and raised fears once again of a colonial war breaking out over Southeast Asia thanks to French aggression. By the end of the summer of 1889, Germany had doubled its vessels deployed in Kampong Som and Amoy, and the Kaiserliche Marine and Marine Imperial had cruisers sail tantalizingly close to one another in the Formosa Straits and south of disputed Phu Quoc soon thereafter..."

- The Scramble for Asia: Colonialism in the Far East in the 19th Century

 

[KingSweden24]

"...for all the political machinations at the Leopoldina Palace, Brazil had not truly been plunged into legitimate crisis since Pedro II's death, but that was soon to change. An outbreak of typhoid fever in Rio de Janeiro in June of 1889 [1] claimed the increasingly frail, widowed Dowager Empress; on her deathbed, she implored Pedro Augusto to look after his brothers and cousins as she "[had] no trust" in Isabel to do it. It was a family request, but it was taken by O Preferido, who wrote of the exchange in his diary with excitement, as a political one. Nearly as soon as Teresa Cristina was interred in the mausoleum beside her beloved husband, the Prince began making aggressive moves ostensibly on behalf of his charge the Emperor, who was now old enough to begin to understand the implications of his cousins' actions, even if the lazy and disinterested Pedro III wouldn't have made any moves himself. Pedro Augusto fired the head of the Army and installed instead his preferred choice, Deodoro da Fonseca, whom he viewed as being loyal to him but acceptable to the positivist and increasingly anti-monarchist conservative Army officer corps; he soon thereafter sparred with the powerful Sousa Dias, who would resign by November, leaving the "Dual Regency" without a Prime Minister as Dowager Isabel and O Preferido argued over who to install over the closely divided government. The oligarchs viewed an Isabeline choice as likely to make further moves against the institution of slavery, which while in sharp decline was still profitable; the industrial class was wary of Pedro Augusto potentially placing a crony in charge of the government who would mess with the white-hot Brazilian economy, which thanks to unrestricted credit from both home and abroad was the fastest-growing in the world. Threats by the Republican bloc in Congress to collapse the body eventually led to a unity Cabinet that had a curious mix, with a Conservative Prime Minister in João Alfredo Correia de Oliveira, who was a supporter of Isabel, and as Minister of Finance Ruy Barbosa [2] and at the Foreign Ministry Jose Antonio Saraiva, both Liberals who were generally thought to align with O Preferido. It was a Cabinet designed not for long-term stability but rather to settle a dispute within the royal family, what with two former Prime Ministers of opposing parties as members..."

- O Imperio do Futuro: The Rise of Brazil

[1] Fictional on my part, basically just speeding the Dowager's death up by six months
[2] Anybody familiar with Brazilian history just winced