Cinco de Mayo

[KingSweden24]

Here we have the Congressional seat allocation for the next decade, with 361 seats, based on 132,500 persons per seat (US pop - territorial population/361 seats), and the commensurate electoral votes once 2 Senators per state are added.

As follows:

New York - 49 (51)
Pennsylvania - 42 (44)
Illinois - 30 (32)
Ohio - 28 (30)
Missouri - 21 (23)
Indiana - 18 (20)
Massachusetts - 17 (19)
Michigan - 17 (19)
Iowa - 16 (18)
Wisconsin - 14 (16)
New Jersey - 12 (14)
California - 12 (14)
Kansas - 12 (14)
Minnesota - 11 (13)
Nebraska - 9 (11)
Maryland - 8 (10)
Maine - 6 (8)
Connecticut - 6 (8)
West Virginia - 6 (8)
Dakota - 4 (6)
Colorado - 4 (6)
New Hampshire - 3 (5)
Washington - 3 (5)
Rhode Island - 3 (5)
Oregon - 3 (5)
Vermont - 3 (5)
Delaware - 2 (4)
New Mexico - 1 (3)
Nevada - 1 (3)

(As you can see, the breakneck growth of several Western states, and the admission of Washington and Dakota, crimp New York and Pennsylvania's ability to add new seats at the pace of some other states)

 

[KingSweden24]

Germany - 50,869,675 (+15%)
United States - 48,698,665 (+29.8%) (surpassed France)
France - 42,949,500 (+4.5%) [1]
United Kingdom - 38,650,657 (+10.6%)
Italy - 31,009,177 (+7.1%)
Spain - 22,696,048 (+7.6%)
Confederate States - 16,901,849 (+17.7%)
Mexico - 15,138,269 (+19.5%)
Brazil - 14,333,915 (+20.6%)

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of good data for population of China, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey at this time, otherwise I would include such figures as well.

State Specific Growth for Confederacy:

State - 1880 Pop - 1890 Pop (% change)

Alabama - 1,247,433 - 1.363.444 (9.3%)
Arkansas - 939,206 - 1,229,864 (30.9%)
Florida - 233,750 - 304,109 (30.1%)
Georgia - 1,416,602 - 1,687,173 (19.1%)
Kentucky - 1,587,909 - 1,789,573 (12.6%)
Louisiana - 1,088,656 - 1,295,501 (19.0%)
Mississippi - 1,137,886 - 1,297,190 (14%)
North Carolina - 1,232,686 - 1,363,351 (10.6%)
South Carolina -770,644 - 987,789 (28.1%)
Tennessee - 1,542,359 - 1,767,543 (14.5%)
Texas - 1,583,906 - 2,223,804 (40.4%)
Virginia - 1,454,345 - 1,592,508 (9.5%)

CS Total - 14,235,382 - 16,901,849 (17.76%)

[1] Still better than OTL, if you can believe that!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the stymied Radical Programme on which the Liberals had expected to govern re-exposed the faultlines between Whig and Radical within Parliament; but Chamberlain, from his post at the Colonial Office, was undettered. The NLF's meeting in the spring of 1891 was a raucous one, where Chamberlain and Dilke had to calm activists down from booing the name of Lord Spencer, whom Chamberlain had come to respect in the six months of Cabinet meetings they had sat in together. As the Canadian fisheries question continued to consume his attention and he recovered from a bad bout of the Russian flu, he was stunned to receive word that Lord Salisbury, the mercurial and powerful Conservative leader of the Lords, had succumbed to that very same disease [1]. Indeed, Salisbury's passing was the first in a succession that would pave the way for the coming Liberal dynasty; the previous Tory Prime Minister, Smith, would pass in October, and the deteriorating health of Lord Churchill left him unable to fill the vacuum, often out of Parliament traveling earnestly in search of good health until he too would expire in 1895. In all, two Tory Prime Ministers and two of the party's dominant personalities would die within an eight year span; it left the opposition, already tone deaf to the matters of the British street and burgeoning middle class, increasingly rudderless, especially as the Liberals began to find their groove..."

- Chamberlain's Britain

[1] Salisbury was, IOTL, a survivor of said flu - here it claims him instead.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the National Widow, as she soon came to be known, lorded over a small court of attendants and what could best be described as ladies in waiting around her at all times. After relocating first to Monroe to mourn, Libby was restless, eager to defend her slain husband's legacy. As many of his already-meager investments had been wiped out in the Panic of 1890, Libby found herself forced to use her newfound platform as the widow of the first assassinated President, a famous man in his own right, to begin to build his legacy from the ground up. Her writings, on his life and career, became hugely successful, as did her writings on the various nations of Indians, the landscapes of the West, and life in the saddle. Interviews were granted by the dozen, and she soon found herself living in a modest estate in northern New Jersey, just a short train ride away from New York City, where she would spend the rest of her life. In her campaigns on behalf of George's memory, she became a transcendent figure entirely; easily the most famous woman in America, her voice mattered in a way it could not for others. In a time when "feminist icon" was a nonexistent concept, Libby was the closest thing. She endorsed the idea of women's suffrage as the movement gained steam, giving it credence and space within the Democratic Party of which she remained an active enthusiast and partisan for the rest of her life; she spoke favorably of radical economic reforms, becoming a key celebrity ally of populist and progressive activists, particularly arguing in favor of maximum working hours, higher wages, and protections for working women and children in particular; as an avid writer and reader, she campaigned on behalf of expanded education, literacy and English proficiency for immigrants, donating some of her growing fortune in her later years to public and private libraries, and in founding the George and Elizabeth Custer Museum and Archive in Monroe, managed by her private organization for his memory, she created the first Presidential library in American history, one which stands to this day as a repository of articles and books written by and about her husband, his Presidential papers, and a treasure trove of their private diaries and correspondence to one another, including some rather ribald love letters. A woman of her time, Libby Custer still transcended it, becoming a titanic figure in the history of the late 19th century both in preserving the mythos of her husband as a martyr cut down before his time (in a way designed to make him stand out from his successors and predecessors at a time when many Presidents had middling popularity) and in standing up for the rights of women everywhere..."

- Consorts of the Republic: American History Through Her First Ladies

(Whoever had "Widowed former First Lady Libby Custer, Feminist Hero" on your bingo cards, come on down)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...stunned by the sudden death of his father, William found himself the heir of the massive Hearst family fortune and mining empire while attempting to find a proper residence in New York. In his journey east, William had fallen in love with the city - it was much more to his liking than San Francisco or Washington, D.C., and his status as the scion of the most prominent mining concern and with his steady income from Pacific American paying his ever-lavish bills, his presence in the Manhattan social scene despite being a rough, uncouth Californian made him a figure widely reported on in the gossip columns. William returned to San Francisco and spent days mulling what would come next; though his endorsement was not sought, Democratic Party leaders selected his friend James Budd to replace the late Senator Hearst in the Senate. Viewing a political career in California unappealing, he consulted with several of the Hearst Company's directors, many of whom wanted a bigger say in the future of the firm. William shocked them all when he announced his plan after a few days at sea - that he intended to sell shares of the Hearst Company publicly, in New York City, and would go even further by moving its formal headquarters there, while keeping its largest footprint, and its subsidiary companies, in California. Hearst employed the services of John P. Morgan of the firm Drexel & Morgan to begin selling the shares on the New York Stock Exchange when he returned; his apartment on Fifth Avenue served as a temporary headquarters as he staffed up his new offices near Wall Street. The injection of liquidity from banks and boost in value of shares from investors eager for a stable company in the wake of the Panic of 1890, and his sale of his share of the Pacific American remittance fund (despite a severe crash in the Chilean economy, saltpeter payments continued to flow) at their peak value, helped William maneuver ever-increasing cash positions into a depressed market in the years before equity values began to recover. By 1894, he was one of the richest men in America, having timed his public offering of Hearst, sale f his Patco shares, and purchases of depressed stock almost perfectly..."

- Citizen Hearst

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Pope Pius X was as firm as Prince Philippe; even after Helene travelled personally to Rome to receive his dispensation, pleading with him to allow her to convert to Anglicanism for love, he refused, albeit saying that his refusal, "Was made with no pleasure." The couple were devastated, and Arthur was certain that that was the end of it; he traveled privately to Balmoral for a long hunting trip with friends from his brief days in the British Army, thinking the matter settled to his satisfaction [1]. To return to the castle with their bucks only to discover that a message had arrived from London - despondent with the thought of being denied his beloved, Albert Victor had personally called on the Queen to renounce his succession rights. Arthur was shocked and furious at the move, even though he privately acknowledged in his diaries, to his mother and, later in life, to his friends that it was for the best, that the future Duke of Clarence was too erratic, emotional and lazy to have made a good King, and that the future George V was always the more capable of the two brothers. The Queen, for her part, was horribly scandalized, determined to more aggressively police the matrimonial decisions of her family from then on to see to it that another "Orleans Affair" did not arise, and the stress from the fallout was largely blamed for her death two years later [2]. It would be nearly a decade before Arthur spoke to "Eddy" again, and not just due to the scandal. He vehemently disapproved of the Duke and Duchess of Clarence eloping to Denmark to be married privately, of their long dalliances on continental Europe that typically ended with missives back to London asking for another extension of the already-generous allowance that the former heir received from the Royal Family, their newfound reputation as partygoers with the likes of Belgium's infamous King Leopold III, maternal cousin Waldemar of Prussia and a parade of lecherous Austrian archdukes, and perhaps most critically of the frank interviews that Albert Victor gave to newspapers both in Britain and beyond that commented perhaps too bluntly on the issues - and, sometimes, the gossip - of the day..."

- The Lion of Edinburgh: Prince Arthur, the Empire and the Twilight of the Victorian Age

[1] Prince Arthur may, on net, be a protagonist of this story, but he is still very much a man of his time and station, and him not wanting his nephew whom he raised like his own son to make this marriage seems fairly in character for him
[2] Spoiler!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the depression of the early 1890s presented enormous opportunity, perhaps none more so than for George Gould, the son of the more infamous Jay. Unlike his father, who never found a business venture he didn't want to dabble in (and attempt to quickly get rich off of), George was a more patient man, interested primarily in railroads. The mass bankruptcies of the great American railroads offered him a new opportunity, one he leapt on immediately - consolidation. With Jay in sharply declining health, George was in charge of managing the family fortune and took advantage of both the weakness of competitors and failing trunk lines to snap up a portfolio of railroads that included the Denver & Rio Grande (DRGW), the Missouri Pacific, and his crown jewel, the Topeka & Santa Fe. In 1891, at the age of only 27, he arranged for their consolidation into a single railroad, the Western Pacific Rail Road (WP), which emerged as a competitor to the Union Pacific just to its north and took advantage of its position in Colorado and New Mexico, from its headquarters in Denver, to begin plotting out an alternate route to California during the next decade, potentially giving it two transcontinental routes. After Jay died in 1892, the ambitious young George continued his plan to face off with the more established UP, Great Northern and Northern Pacific for transcontinental traffic by snapping up smaller railroads in Missouri and Illinois to connect with the great hub in Chicago; his competitors run by older men who profoundly disliked the Goulds noticed, and a competition to assemble the largest railroad trusts possible kicked off with the Railroad Wars of the 1890s..."

- The Age of the Railroad

 

[KingSweden24]

"...though only twelve people had died when the smoke cleared, the May Day Massacre nevertheless became a rallying cry for French socialists and further demonstrations were held after mass vigils in industrial cities like Lille or Lyons, or the port city of Marseille, where dockworkers refusing to work and throwing crates into the Mediterranean when strikebreakers attempted to force the matter caused millions of francs in losses to the already suffering merchant houses and caused a minor run on the Credit Maritime. Napoleon was furious at the bloodshed and noted to MacMahon that across the border from Lille were where "agitators" in Belgium had caused mass civil unrest due to crackdowns for nearly a decade now; between the deaths at the march in Paris on May Day and the Bastille Riots during his prized Exposition, the Emperor saw "Belgianization" on the horizon. His response was to send Boulanger, still well liked by the working class, out to personally meet with labor leaders and local politicians in the more radical regional legislatures; the War Minister, who before then had little firsthand exposure to domestic matters, returned with a laundry list of reforms that the Emperor promptly pushed his bloc in the National Assembly to wave through, and likewise with his rubber stamp House of Peers. A ten-hour workday for men and eight-hour workday for women was established, along with expanding the number of industries for whom Sunday labor was regulated; a ban on children under the age of eight working, and stricter regulations on the labor of children aged between nine and twelve, as well as expanded accident and unemployment insurance. A national pension was dismissed by Boulanger as unworkable, but it was the first true flash of paternalistic National Contract politics in nearly a decade; despite the lack of a minimum wage or public pension, and with the education question still largely unsettled to the dismay of the growing liberal middle class, the Emperor had nonetheless maneuvered his way out of a crisis that would have consumed another state yet again, sidestepping the volatile passions of the French street. More importantly, the Boulanger Laws, as they became known, associated a man previously better known for his dominance of a string of hapless foreign ministers from his perch at the War Ministry with the needs and demands of the working people of France, a deep and emotional connection..."

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

 

[KingSweden24]

"...perhaps nothing angered Hill more, even more than the wall of opposition his proposed income tax and expanded regulatory powers for the ICC ran into on Capitol Hill, than the whisper campaign started in certain less-reputable circles that he had had Custer assassinated. Though the men had not been close, and Hill resented the easygoing, charismatic soldier's popularity first in life and then his martyred status in death [1], he had genuinely grieved his predecessor's death and saw it as a solemn duty to bring the country together metaphorically in the wake of the national tragedy. Hill, though a sharp-elbowed partisan by instinct, made efforts in those first mournful months to turn down the temperature on the political debates of the day; for instance, his enthusiastic endorsement for the Hoar Antitrust Act [2] helped bridge debate within Congress on the matter enough to send a bipartisan compromise version of the bill to his desk, the passage of which remains the major accomplishment of his term. He and his wife [3] wore mourning black labels for nearly a year, and he kept an apartment at the Executive Mansion for Libby Custer, who rarely took him up on the offer, preferring to stay with the Bayards when in Washington, but he made sure nobody else stayed in it on the off chance that it would be needed for the "Nation's Widow."

So for rumors to circulate that Hill had had Custer shot on his orders outraged him to no end. The rumors were never as overt as "Hill Killed Custer?" the satirical headline that suggested that Hill was too bumbling and ineffective to carry out the order; it was merely a whisper campaign that, well, maybe he knew something, perhaps he'd had "something" to do with it, in order to attain the Presidency. The firing of many of Custer's political appointees created suspicion as to his motives; his appointment of Judson Harmon, an Ohio lawyer and former judge considered a Democratic partisan close to Adlai Stevenson, to replace the universally respected retiring Justice Thurman (a fellow Ohioan) on the Supreme Court drew some controversy. Little things always caused a bubble of "well, but" conversations regarding the President and the bizarre circumstances of his predecessor's death; they would dismay and haunt Hill to his grave, and he treasured a letter from Bayard, whom he otherwise was suspicious of trying to undermine his authority within Cabinet and in Congress, reassuring him to "forge on, David, listen naught to these voices that seek only to cut you off at the knees; such jealous sounds, such duplicitous sounds, seek only to keep you out of safe port"..."

- Boss Hill

[1] It's easy to forget things from the previous decades as they slide on, much like our own history; I'm realizing now that Custer and Confederate President Nathan B. Forrest had pretty similar trajectories, all things being equal. Swaggering populist former cavalrymen, who insisted on riding their horses everywhere, who made their name punching down at a particular underclass and whipped their base into an angry frenzy, followed around by personal paramilitaries, only to die in office under bizarre circumstances (Custer is much more of a martyr in his death than Forrest croaking from yellow fever during his Cuban debacle, of course)
[2] More on this in an upcoming update
[3] Have been unable to find the name of Hill's spouse anywhere; maybe he was a lifelong bachelor? Who knows. We'll assume he was married, I guess

 

[KingSweden24]

Brief interlude - I mostly have the next 2 years of CdM content charted out, but want to take requests on content readers may want updates on. It’s easy for me to just full steam ahead and ignore wide swaths of the world as I zero in on areas and people more key to the story. Anything/anywhere/anyone we haven’t checked in on for a while that you want an update on?

 

[sodan]

can we have an update on africa? regions like Algeria or Egypt

 

[green demon]

can we have an update on africa? regions like Algeria or Egypt

I wouldn't mind seeing more on Africa myself. I've been wondering I believe that former slaves in the US have been having a hard time integrating into society, more so than in the OTL. Would there be a reinterest in the American Colonization Society (ACS)?

 

[Aghstadian]

Brief interlude - I mostly have the next 2 years of CdM content charted out, but want to take requests on content readers may want updates on. It’s easy for me to just full steam ahead and ignore wide swaths of the world as I zero in on areas and people more key to the story. Anything/anywhere/anyone we haven’t checked in on for a while that you want an update on?

Africa or maybe Middle East.

 

[KingSweden24]

Well it looks like we have a strong preference for African content! There’ll be some stuff on Algeria in 1893ish I’ve planned but some updates on the Scramble and Italy’s shenanigans in Ethiopia would probably be a place to start!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...though the panic that roiled Europe touched Germany - how could it not? - Frederick's reign did not take on the same grim tones as much of his peers during that same time thanks in large part to Germany's "mixed banking" system. As a fairly new state, with a relatively new uniform currency, born out of a customs union, Germany lacked the grand bourses and centralized financial centers of Britain, France, and even the United States, Austria or Spain. Instead, it had a number of smaller banks, that invested primarily domestically and were well-integrated with Germany's burgeoning industries, diversified throughout the various member states and cities, with no bloated and overleveraged institutions like Barings of London or Union Generale of Paris. This approach would serve Germany well throughout the decades ahead, as it chuffed along with consistent growth rather than the boom-bust cycles and ever-continuing search for capital-intensive investments overseas for rapacious shareholders that typified many of its neighbors; in this sense, the vaunted "German model" was born out of its mixed banking model from the 19th century, encouraged and nurtured by Frederick himself who remarked that "we have dodged the worst of this storm" as Germany weathered the early 1890s depression better than most any other state in the industrializing world..."

- Frederick and Victoria: Consorts of Germany

 

[KingSweden24]

"...in the final years of the Feliciato, the cultural wave capturing the Alitplanense imagination was that of the "Aztec revival," where the arts drew inspiration from the country's Mesoamerican past. "Moctezuma," one of the most famous operas ever written in the Spanish language, debuted in its native Mexico at the Imperial Opera on the Paseo Emperatriz, with a Maya-descendant soprano as its lead, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. Fascination with the Aztecs and Mayans flourished as sponsored excavations at Teotihuacan, Chichen Itza and Tulum were accompanied by wide distribution of photographs of said digs and their treasures in the burgeoning Mexican press; Maximilian himself was a major patron of the digs, both out of his personal interest in the subject and as a form of Mexican nationalism during lean economic times and with the scars of the Caudillo War not yet fully healed. The Aztec revival was seen in architecture, where new buildings throughout the country looked to Mesoamerican designs, often subtle in nature, rather than the colonial or baroque style popular in decades past. It was the synthesis of Mexico's indigenous and European heritage in one, of a unique form born in the country itself, nurtured and encouraged by the generous Emperor, who raved about the explosion in innovative art that emerged out of the final years of Zuloaga's premiership..."

- Maximilian of Mexico

(I will say, purely as an aside, I'm personally quite an enthusiast of Latin American architecture, both of the Spanish colonial style and the unique, pseudo-brutalist style one sees in many public buildings built in postwar South America and Mexico that is unimitated elsewhere)

 

[Darth_Kiryan]

Man Maximilian is still going strong with his transformation of Mexico. And given that his brother Franz Josef lived until he was 86, he might still be alive for a while yet.

 

[pathfinder]

I was wondering when something like this might would happen. Max had such an enthusiasm and interest in the indigenous peoples of Mexico, for their cultures and languages, their history, as well as for their welfare. It was only a matter of time that that interest would eventually trickle down to the wealthy and educated Mexican classes, which had up to this point often looked down on the indios.

 

[Tamar of the Tamar tribe]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel? In this Timeline?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Seward_Burroughs_I? In this Timeline?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith? In this Timeline?

 

[KingSweden24]

Man Maximilian is still going strong with his transformation of Mexico. And given that his brother Franz Josef lived until he was 86, he might still be alive for a while yet.

He'll be around a while more! His brothers were pretty long-lived (Karl Ludwig got taken before his time, IMO). I have two future dates in mind for when Max will no longer be with us (unfortunately! Because when his time comes, I'm going to miss writing him), depending on which option I want to pursue, but they're a while off yet.

I was wondering when something like this might would happen. Max had such an enthusiasm and interest in the indigenous peoples of Mexico, for their cultures and languages, their history, as well as for their welfare. It was only a matter of time that that interest would eventually trickle down to the wealthy and educated Mexican classes, which had up to this point often looked down on the indios.

Everything I've read about him makes him seem like a really intellectually curious, kind and interesting man. He's almost 60 in this TL; definitely reaching that age where he wants to indulge his curiosities with his heir now married and Mexico effectively at peace after the caudillos were defeated a decade earlier