Decades of Darkness

The United States, I would imagine, is liable to get even more authoritarian over time, not less; freedom of speech is still likely to be true but how much you get to say before you get reported to the authorities depends on where you live and this will be worse once the equivalent of international broadcasting comes about, to say nothing of the Internet. Death squads are something which have been used, for example, and enslaving even people that Americans ostensibly saw as their moral and political equals (i.e., white Canadians) is something that was eventually accepted as necessary to defend the security of the nation. Even if New England tries to thaw its very icy relationship with the U.S. while it rebuilds from Vitalist mismanagement, it has an ideological drive to try to use abolitionist efforts in its intelligence operations that it didn't necessarily possess before due to the state's socialist leanings. The Green Scare or whatever it's called is likely to be hundreds of times worse ITTL. Not only is New England a place with historical enmity working against them, but the fact that it speaks the same language means that any transnational literature will be scrutinized to the nth degree. It would be very easy to see how various departments can smear otherwise well-meaning Americans who want to see slavery done away with as Yankee, Australian, or any other sort of foreign-backed saboteur. The smart ones will buy one-way tickets while those that aren't so smart will find themselves sent off to some unnamed black site.

It would appear the way New England's government is set up is probably going to get a massive overhaul; we've gotten hints of this, like the governor-general seemingly being what amounts to a largely inoffensive figurehead. A multi-party parliamentary democracy in the style of Europe or one of the Restored Empire nations would probably be viewed as a safeguard from letting something like the Mullins regime happen again. There's also probably the perceived benefit of further casting away lingering American influence on their politics from New England's founding, though that's less practical and more for nationalistic reasons. That said, if there is a downside, it could go either way in regards to giving the armed forces permission to remove people perceived as too threatening to the Commonwealth. Now that a coup has happened, and its benefit was a net positive from what we can glean, that genie can't be put back into its bottle.

My personal head canon was always that the Vitalists ran away with their tails between their legs, assuming they didn't get caught, and left for Liberia ala the Nazis going to South America following WWII. I suspect they'd have golden parachutes when they got to Wilkinston anyway since Duvalier was so cozy with them beforehand.
New England's likely gonna have a very similar issue as OTL's Turkey. There's precedent for the armed forces seeing themselves as the defenders of the nation's liberal, democratic values against authoritarianism, both foreign (the *US) and domestic (home-grown vitalists), including a Cincinnatus streak of having the right to overthrow leaders who they see as autocrats in order to restore democracy, not unlike how the OTL Turkish military sees itself as the defenders of secularism and Kemalism against Islamism. In New England politics, the "deep state" won't be a conspiracy theory, it will be a very real force with the military at its center. I expect the intelligence services and the bureaucracy to have a very similar attitude and align themselves with the military on the issue, especially once they're purged of vitalist apparatchiks.

That said, there's an interesting wrinkle I see here. In the modern era, the military and intelligence aren't usually known as bastions of progressivism. In New England, however, the army is the force that overthrew a reactionary tyranny. What's more, for various reasons, New England likely isn't engaged in much foreign adventurism, and what it is engaged in is mostly in support of forces opposing the *US, a far-right, white supremacist state. I think it would be safe to say that the New England armed forces and intelligence services would be very progressive and egalitarian on a variety of social and cultural issues, chiefly when it comes to race but not exclusively so, especially as time goes on. For instance, given the historic attachment of OTL's feminism and LGBT+ rights to liberal and left-wing political causes, I can see New England being one of the first nations to let women and openly gay people serve, including in combat roles.

Taken together, postwar New England is going to be a nation that is very, very culturally left-leaning on an institutional level, including in places that in OTL are bastions of conservatism in many nations, with social conservatives locked out of politics and regarded with suspicion as crypto-vitalists. In the postwar era, its culture will likely have a global reputation akin to a mix of West Berlin, hippie-era San Francisco, the Left Bank of Paris, and 2010s Tumblr, a place where the authorities are actively supporting ideas and activities that are considered countercultural and subversive in much of the world. There will be a backlash eventually, and given what I said earlier it's likely to get nasty, but the '40s and '50s in New York, Boston, Buffalo, and Detroit are probably gonna be wild, and Yankee movies and music will be treated the way OTL's Americans treated French and Swedish arthouse cinema, as either a much-desired forbidden fruit or sick filth that needs to be banned. It'll probably take a long time for the stereotype of the modest, no-fun-having Yankee Puritan to recover.

And in the other direction, to go back to what you said about rising authoritarianism in the *US, I can see the *US' previously libertine culture turning a lot more restrictive in response. They'll still be fine with drugs, for various reasons; if anything, there could be an "opiate of the masses" thing going there, as the government actively supports drugs not just as a black-market export but to keep the population docile. (That's why New Left activists criticized the hippie movement in OTL; Gil Scott-Heron, for instance, castigated them as drones who were no real threat to the system and would "plug in, turn on, and cop out" when the revolution came.) But like you said, there will be a very nasty alt-Red Scare seeing New England and Australia as subversive forces out to tear down American society. In a lot of more conservative quarters aligned with the government, cultural progressivism will likely be quickly identified with foreign enemies, as gender equality and gay rights are seen as slippery slopes to abolitionism -- and don't get them started on those who directly criticize how slaves and peons are treated.

OTOH, I can see the *US looking the other way towards a right-wing counterculture akin to OTL's alt-right. @BeyondTheBorg made an earlier post here about this, suggesting that, thanks to the *US' different historical experiences and the influence of Amber Jarrett, the mid-20th-century counterculture in their country could take the form of "an unholy philosophical amalgamation of Nietzsche, Ragnar Redbeard, Ayn Rand, the Nazis, BDSM, New Atheism, and alt-right chan culture", as well as ironically drawing influence from New England vitalism and suggesting that New England's backlash against it is a sign of their cultural and racial inferiority.
 
I finally was able to read through the entirety of the Decades of Darkness in the past few weeks, though I knew about the broad outline of the TL and had skimmed significant portions of it before. It is truly a monumental work and one of the most elaborate fictional universes ever created.
I'm glad you liked it. I've tried to answer some of the questions below, though note that

1. In terms of animation and the film industry more generally, the main thing to remember is that TL has no equivalent to the overwhelming global dominance of Hollywood. In OTL while there are some national or regional film markets which can be quite large (Indian and Chinese film industries, for example), the combination of English as a world language and the US as the world's largest economy has meant that Hollywood has by far the largest global reach for films.

ITTL, there's an American film industry, which has some broader reach but is hardly globally dominant. There's a German film industry, and a Russian film industry, and a (North) Indian film industry, and an Australian film industry, and so on. Some of those films have crossover into other markets, but not to the same degree. So even with animation, what would emerge would be rather more would be German-style animation, Russian-style animation, and so on.

2) How absolute is the First Amendment in the DOD USA? You do mention that there are reformists and closet abolitionists who work to make the system more humane and refuse to personally own slaves such as Cordell Hull and advocates of slave rebellion probably could be prosecuted under "incitement" grounds. However, are there radical abolitionist organizations and individuals who urge for gradual and peaceful but full emancipation of all individuals in bondage and perhaps even granting them the rights of citizenship? Are such groups allowed freedom of speech and assembly? Certainly, they will be very well outside of the mainstream and it would about as socially acceptable to be an abolitionist as it would have been to be an open communist in OTL 1950s USA. They would probably be blacklisted from the major professions and the universities as well as be unelectable to political office but I would hope that those few lonely voices are permitted to exist.
The First Amendment still exists, and still gives pretty good protections for citizens, on the whole. But it is certainly not absolute. There are a variety of caveats to it, and pretexts for avoidance. The biggest one is that any speech deemed as seditious (or seditious libel) is not protected by the First Amendment. What counts as sedition has varied over time and also varies per state - states with a larger population of slaves or peons are more trigger-happy about it, for obvious reasons - but anything which involves saying directly to slaves or peons "you should be free" tends to attract Consequences. Advocating for better treatment of slaves or peons would usually be fine. Talking verbally with other citizens about pretty much anything is usually fine from a legal perspective (though not from a social one), even "I think we should free all the slaves." Putting it in writing is more dangerous since it may be deemed as dangerous literature. Actually distributing abolitionist literature to slaves or peons is, um, a freedom-limiting move.
3) Given you mention that the President of the *United States in 1949 is a historical figure and he's mentioned as pursuing a "Good Neighbour" policy, is the US President Cordell Hull? Does Nielsen only become President in the 1950s?
I don't remember if I'd confirmed this before, but Cordell Hull was the 1949 president, in the current version of the timeline (more on this below). Nielsen was later.
4) In the Fox and the Jackal, why did Leydon's childhood friend Annabelle flee from New England to South Africa? Did this occur during the Vitalist dictatorship or Mullins's later overthrow?
I honestly don't remember what the original reason was at this point - that novel has gone through several rewrite iterations and can't recall if there was anything significant attached to it in that version. In the latest draft, it just represented the trickle of people who left New England to get somewhere out of America's shadow.
5) What does the New England party system look like under the Commonwealth? I suspect the Socialist Alliance may be in for a long period of dominance similar to the Swedish Social Democrats OTL. I could see a lot of the more left wing Radicals joining the Socialists to create a big-tent left party while also simultaneously moderating the Socialist agenda. The opposition will be an odd coalition of more moderate Radicals, Federalists, and even ex-Vitalists. Its somewhat hard to see them work together after the Mullins dictatorship, so perhaps the Right will split into a centrist/center-right pro-business Radical Republican Party and a post-Vitalist National Party. Its possible the New England government will place restrictions on explicitly Vitalist parties but given Mullins was overthrown by coup there could very well be a hardcore of continuing Vitalist supporters of around 20-25% of population. Wonder what happens to other high ranking Vitalist figures such as Rundle and Ingersoll.
For at least the first 16 years, the Socialist Alliance is the party and more of the manoeuvring happens for factions within the party - who gets the nomination largely determines who gets the election. While there are a few exceptions, most of the ex-Vitalists pretend that they Really Weren't In The Party and migrate into various opposition factions or the Christian Socialist faction of the Socialist Alliance. (That last causes some tensions).

An opposition party gradually coalesces around pro-business / pro-traditionalist / pro-lower-my-taxes style of government, but it takes a while to get going.

Ingersoll got life imprisonment, mostly due to being a genuine war hero and lack of certainty about what part he played in making sure that the coup wasn't detected. What happened to Rundle may be a minor point in the novels at some stage so I won't specify too much yet.
6) How common is capital punishment in DOD? I certainly don't see the United States abolishing it anytime soon and if anything, given the Southern dominance of the US, it will probably be even more commonly used than in OTL 1940s and 1950s US. A few of the northern states such as Iowa and Wilkinson may never have allowed it as was the case OTL in those states. No idea how commonly capital punishment was used in Vitalist New England but its very likely that it ends up abolished under the Commonwealth, at least after the sentences for Vitalist era figures have been passed. I suspect Germany will retain it for much longer than OTL without there being a reaction to Nazism.
As of the 1950s, capital punishment remains on the books in every sovereign country in the New World (though not every individual state within those countries), though in some cases the only remaining capital offence is treason. Capital punishment was abolished in Republican Brazil for a while but reinstated in its successor states, albeit not used all that often.

The Old World remains more complicated but safe to say that more countries retain it than have abolished it.
7) How big is the American Socialist Party? They are not mentioned as being present at the Third Socialist International in the 1880s but it seems likely to me that there is at least a small Socialist Party consisting of recent immigrants, some labour union types, and more leftier ex-Populists. Incidentally how strong are labour unions in the DOD US and do they tend to favour the Unionists or Democrats?
The American Socialists exist as a party but weren't at the Third Socialist International because, well, they're Americans.

Labour unions exist, but labour relations are awkward in any industry when they are in potential competition with unfree labour. Opposing that can get things riled up. Generally speaking, labour unions are more concentrated in specialist industries which for one reason or another aren't suitable for unfree labour. In partial substitution, there's more of a trend for some regulation for minimum standards (generally at state/county level rather than federal level) for citizens. These have usually been worked out as part of political compromises. There's no federal equivalent to the New Deal or anything like it.
8) Some thoughts regarding urban demographics in New England and the US:

-You mention New York City being even larger TTL than in OTL but I'm not sure if that will be the case. NYC isn't the megapolitan cultural, financial, and immigrant center of the United States like it was and is OTL, even if New England gets a disproportionate share of immigration to North America. In particular, the Jewish population of NYC will be rather smaller than OTL's population at mid century given the substantially improved conditions for Jews in continental Europe.

-Given the more southerly orientation of the US, I expect the cities of the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys to be much more populous here. In particular, Louisville and Cincinnati may be slowly merging into each other to create a huge conurbation. However, given the huge utility of the Great Lakes, cities like Erie and Cleveland will be pretty significant despite being on the border of New England. Ditto with Pittsburgh given its a very logical site for the steel industry.

-Cities along the Gulf Coast will generally be larger given its status as an American lake in this world. Pensacola will be a massive military city and *Houston (dunno what TTL name is) will be booming.
NYC was bigger than its OTL equivalent for a while due to more nineteenth-century immigration ending up in New England. It's probably become relatively smaller at some point, though the numbers can be debated.

City growth in the broader US is something I've considered from various angles, but one which came up after the writing of the main part of the timeline was some of historian Gavin Wright's observations about how the lack of urbanisation in the antebellum South didn't just extend to lack of large cities - it also meant that it had relatively few in the way of small towns, too - and that the growth of small towns exploded after the ACW. Seemed to be a symptom of unfree labour being much more moible and being largely used for agricultural purposes.

There were some caveats to that, in that in the non-cotton regions you did start to see the growth of small towns and industry, albeit it at a slower pace than in the North - Virginia being the most obvious example of that, but also part of Tennessee and Missouri. There were also still some factories at suitable sites, not necessarily in larger towns - cotton mills along fall line towns in the eastern Appalachians, for example. There's also how the lower urbanisation rates were also affected by some mosquito-borne diseases - malaria and yellow fever hit harder in New Orleans than in New York, for example - and the better tropical medicine of TTL's USA helping to alleviate some of that.

Where this matters is that I need to do some more rethinking about the pace of urbanisation in difference US regions and how it links to the predominant agriculture or other industries within those regions. Where cotton is predominant, for instance, I'd still expect general urbanisation rates to be slower than in OTL outside of a few specific exceptions where particular resources or other factors encourage urbanisation. Steel in *Birmingham, Alabama, for example, some ports and key rail hubs, military bases, and the like. Outside of cotton (or, later, sugar) areas, I'd expect urbanisation rates to be relatively higher.

That segues into a broader note, which is that this is as good a point as any to report that the rewrite of DoD has - very slowly - begun. To date this has mostly been a lot of deleting sections which need to be replaced. Of most note is that the history of TTL's Europe is going to be significantly rewritten from the Congress of Vienna onwards. So much so that a lot of it will be unrecognisable, though there will still be a Great War of sorts. There are a bunch of changes within North America as well (the Nephites are going to be removed and rethought with some other alternate religious movements, for example, and I've planned some changes to New England and Canada in the ninettenth century which will make some of the twentieth century sections significantly different), and flow-on changes for the rest of the world.

This will unfortunately include a lot of the guest contributor posts - the biggest part of the editing so far has been to cut around 26,000 words, much of which were written by guest authors, though also some of my own. Partly this is because some of the planned changes to the timeline simply mean that the previous sections are inconsistent. Partly this is because the new version of DoD will be aimed for publication, and that means there would need to be discussion about authorship and waiving of any royalties which would need to be had for any guest authors. Some of the guest contributor posts may well be salvageable, and I will be contacting some of the guest authors individually about that in due course (not any time soon).

I also don't want to raise any expectations that this will mean a new version of DoD appearing next week, or even (necessarily) next year. It's a big project and it's far from my only writing project - LoRaG is still ogoing, for instance, as is a space opera series I'm working on, and a variety of smaller projects. But work has started.
 
Jared, you won't be directly changing the old posts on here right? I'm not sure if it makes sense to even think this but I'm suddenly overcome with the irrational fear that I'll be unable to read it here as I've done to pass the time for almost half my life when I'm needing occupational reading so I really hope you don't do that D:
 
New England's likely gonna have a very similar issue as OTL's Turkey. There's precedent for the armed forces seeing themselves as the defenders of the nation's liberal, democratic values against authoritarianism, both foreign (the *US) and domestic (home-grown vitalists), including a Cincinnatus streak of having the right to overthrow leaders who they see as autocrats in order to restore democracy, not unlike how the OTL Turkish military sees itself as the defenders of secularism and Kemalism against Islamism. In New England politics, the "deep state" won't be a conspiracy theory, it will be a very real force with the military at its center. I expect the intelligence services and the bureaucracy to have a very similar attitude and align themselves with the military on the issue, especially once they're purged of vitalist apparatchiks.

That said, there's an interesting wrinkle I see here. In the modern era, the military and intelligence aren't usually known as bastions of progressivism. In New England, however, the army is the force that overthrew a reactionary tyranny. What's more, for various reasons, New England likely isn't engaged in much foreign adventurism, and what it is engaged in is mostly in support of forces opposing the *US, a far-right, white supremacist state. I think it would be safe to say that the New England armed forces and intelligence services would be very progressive and egalitarian on a variety of social and cultural issues, chiefly when it comes to race but not exclusively so, especially as time goes on. For instance, given the historic attachment of OTL's feminism and LGBT+ rights to liberal and left-wing political causes, I can see New England being one of the first nations to let women and openly gay people serve, including in combat roles.

A stronger parallel imo is OTL Portugal which saw a military coup to overthrow the authoritarian regime that had been established by Salazar but abandoned any political involvement once the transition to liberal democracy had been completed. New England was a stable, prosperous liberal democracy before the Vitalists took power and the New England military isn't facing down a large (arguably a majority) Islamist bloc that rejects state laicite nor are there many violent far right and far left terrorist groups. If the New England military finds itself constantly forced to intervene in politics, something is going very wrong here. The military will definitely enjoy a cozy relationship with the Socialist government but it will mostly display itself in far-right officers not getting promotions while the government gives generous funding to the armed forces if only because of the threat of the United States. OTL 1950s Sweden under Social Democratic rule is a good example here, as is to a lesser extent Israel. I definitely could see New England being one of the first states to allow women and openly gay individuals to serve but it will be primarily for pragmatic reasons as a way to maximize manpower to counter the colossus to the south, again akin to OTL Israel.

Taken together, postwar New England is going to be a nation that is very, very culturally left-leaning on an institutional level, including in places that in OTL are bastions of conservatism in many nations, with social conservatives locked out of politics and regarded with suspicion as crypto-vitalists. In the postwar era, its culture will likely have a global reputation akin to a mix of West Berlin, hippie-era San Francisco, the Left Bank of Paris, and 2010s Tumblr, a place where the authorities are actively supporting ideas and activities that are considered countercultural and subversive in much of the world. There will be a backlash eventually, and given what I said earlier it's likely to get nasty, but the '40s and '50s in New York, Boston, Buffalo, and Detroit are probably gonna be wild, and Yankee movies and music will be treated the way OTL's Americans treated French and Swedish arthouse cinema, as either a much-desired forbidden fruit or sick filth that needs to be banned. It'll probably take a long time for the stereotype of the modest, no-fun-having Yankee Puritan to recover.

And in the other direction, to go back to what you said about rising authoritarianism in the *US, I can see the *US' previously libertine culture turning a lot more restrictive in response. They'll still be fine with drugs, for various reasons; if anything, there could be an "opiate of the masses" thing going there, as the government actively supports drugs not just as a black-market export but to keep the population docile. (That's why New Left activists criticized the hippie movement in OTL; Gil Scott-Heron, for instance, castigated them as drones who were no real threat to the system and would "plug in, turn on, and cop out" when the revolution came.) But like you said, there will be a very nasty alt-Red Scare seeing New England and Australia as subversive forces out to tear down American society. In a lot of more conservative quarters aligned with the government, cultural progressivism will likely be quickly identified with foreign enemies, as gender equality and gay rights are seen as slippery slopes to abolitionism -- and don't get them started on those who directly criticize how slaves and peons are treated.

The problem with this analysis is that it explicitly contradicts what Jared has wrote in the TL. The TL has a 1950s review of an American movie set during the Roman Republic which mentions how the film has graphic violence and sexual content that would shock audiences from OTL Fifties including bared breasts and is only available in censored versions in New England. There is nothing inherently contradictory about cultural libertarianism (not progressivism) coexisting with a racialist, slaveholding society especially given the cultural development of DOD USA. Even less likely is the idea that New England will suddenly veer far to the cultural left. Remember that Leroy Abbard is a Christian Socialist and while he isn't exactly a puritan (in either the small case "p" or capital "P" sense), I don't think he is exactly likely to kickstart the Permissive Society decades early. There will be very culturally progressive secular socialists in New England but there will be more culturally conservative tendencies as well even within the political left. Social conservatism is hardly going to be totally discredited as a result of Vitalism-OTL West Germany remained a deeply socially conservative society well into the 1960s.

OTOH, I can see the *US looking the other way towards a right-wing counterculture akin to OTL's alt-right. @BeyondTheBorg made an earlier post here about this, suggesting that, thanks to the *US' different historical experiences and the influence of Amber Jarrett, the mid-20th-century counterculture in their country could take the form of "an unholy philosophical amalgamation of Nietzsche, Ragnar Redbeard, Ayn Rand, the Nazis, BDSM, New Atheism, and alt-right chan culture", as well as ironically drawing influence from New England vitalism and suggesting that New England's backlash against it is a sign of their cultural and racial inferiority.

I agree with there being a RW counterculture but it will have a strong cultural libertarian streak that I alluded to above and at least some of its leading intellectuals will be highly critical or dismissive of Christianity and conventional Western morality. Note that all of the gay characters in TTL were *Americans and while they certainly were not "out" about it, neither do any of them have a serious dangerous of ending up forcibly institutionalized or jailed like OTL Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing. It's quite possible to me that if there is a gay rights movement it may happen happen in the United States first.
 
New England's likely gonna have a very similar issue as OTL's Turkey. There's precedent for the armed forces seeing themselves as the defenders of the nation's liberal, democratic values against authoritarianism, both foreign (the *US) and domestic (home-grown vitalists), including a Cincinnatus streak of having the right to overthrow leaders who they see as autocrats in order to restore democracy, not unlike how the OTL Turkish military sees itself as the defenders of secularism and Kemalism against Islamism. In New England politics, the "deep state" won't be a conspiracy theory, it will be a very real force with the military at its center. I expect the intelligence services and the bureaucracy to have a very similar attitude and align themselves with the military on the issue, especially once they're purged of vitalist apparatchiks.

That said, there's an interesting wrinkle I see here. In the modern era, the military and intelligence aren't usually known as bastions of progressivism. In New England, however, the army is the force that overthrew a reactionary tyranny. What's more, for various reasons, New England likely isn't engaged in much foreign adventurism, and what it is engaged in is mostly in support of forces opposing the *US, a far-right, white supremacist state. I think it would be safe to say that the New England armed forces and intelligence services would be very progressive and egalitarian on a variety of social and cultural issues, chiefly when it comes to race but not exclusively so, especially as time goes on. For instance, given the historic attachment of OTL's feminism and LGBT+ rights to liberal and left-wing political causes, I can see New England being one of the first nations to let women and openly gay people serve, including in combat roles.

Taken together, postwar New England is going to be a nation that is very, very culturally left-leaning on an institutional level, including in places that in OTL are bastions of conservatism in many nations, with social conservatives locked out of politics and regarded with suspicion as crypto-vitalists. In the postwar era, its culture will likely have a global reputation akin to a mix of West Berlin, hippie-era San Francisco, the Left Bank of Paris, and 2010s Tumblr, a place where the authorities are actively supporting ideas and activities that are considered countercultural and subversive in much of the world. There will be a backlash eventually, and given what I said earlier it's likely to get nasty, but the '40s and '50s in New York, Boston, Buffalo, and Detroit are probably gonna be wild, and Yankee movies and music will be treated the way OTL's Americans treated French and Swedish arthouse cinema, as either a much-desired forbidden fruit or sick filth that needs to be banned. It'll probably take a long time for the stereotype of the modest, no-fun-having Yankee Puritan to recover.

And in the other direction, to go back to what you said about rising authoritarianism in the *US, I can see the *US' previously libertine culture turning a lot more restrictive in response. They'll still be fine with drugs, for various reasons; if anything, there could be an "opiate of the masses" thing going there, as the government actively supports drugs not just as a black-market export but to keep the population docile. (That's why New Left activists criticized the hippie movement in OTL; Gil Scott-Heron, for instance, castigated them as drones who were no real threat to the system and would "plug in, turn on, and cop out" when the revolution came.) But like you said, there will be a very nasty alt-Red Scare seeing New England and Australia as subversive forces out to tear down American society. In a lot of more conservative quarters aligned with the government, cultural progressivism will likely be quickly identified with foreign enemies, as gender equality and gay rights are seen as slippery slopes to abolitionism -- and don't get them started on those who directly criticize how slaves and peons are treated.

OTOH, I can see the *US looking the other way towards a right-wing counterculture akin to OTL's alt-right. @BeyondTheBorg made an earlier post here about this, suggesting that, thanks to the *US' different historical experiences and the influence of Amber Jarrett, the mid-20th-century counterculture in their country could take the form of "an unholy philosophical amalgamation of Nietzsche, Ragnar Redbeard, Ayn Rand, the Nazis, BDSM, New Atheism, and alt-right chan culture", as well as ironically drawing influence from New England vitalism and suggesting that New England's backlash against it is a sign of their cultural and racial inferiority.
@Marius Mazzini has critiqued this better than you can but to step back I think you're falling into a trap that you see a lot on here on injecting too much OTL contemporary politics into a very different world by assigning personally desirable trends to the "goodies" and undesirable ones to the "baddies". Part of what makes this story so good is Jared has done a very good job of highlighting cultural and ideological juxtapositions that seem odd in OTL but make complete sense in the context of this very different world e.g. *US has a laissez faire attitude to drugs embedded in it's culture and has embraced Anglo-Hispanic multilingualism, two socially progressive concepts, right alongside the slavery and other horrors.
 
The honest question is how a more general 20th century puritanism (which I'd argue is New England based) interacts with things such as slave markets and a greater acceptance of masters sleeping with slaves. For example, would the United States ever get to the point where a woman can file for divorce based on observing her husband having intercourse with a female slave. Would a culture that would find a white woman nursing her child inappropriate feel the same way about a slave doing the same things? (and perhaps a third possibility, a black woman serving as a nursemaid to a white baby.)
 
Jared, you won't be directly changing the old posts on here right? I'm not sure if it makes sense to even think this but I'm suddenly overcome with the irrational fear that I'll be unable to read it here as I've done to pass the time for almost half my life when I'm needing occupational reading so I really hope you don't do that D:
Go to the website and download copy
It's great
 
Jared, you won't be directly changing the old posts on here right? I'm not sure if it makes sense to even think this but I'm suddenly overcome with the irrational fear that I'll be unable to read it here as I've done to pass the time for almost half my life when I'm needing occupational reading so I really hope you don't do that D:
That will depend how I end up publishing it. Some publication options would require me to get other online copies removed, others wouldn't. That's still to be determined. However, as @Darth_Kiryan said, you can still download a copy of the timeline document for now. That may be worth pursuing because at some point I'll have to remove that.
 
In slightly belated Christmas news (for those who celebrate it), I can report that I've re-entered writing in the DoDverse with a new short story which is aimed for publication.

This is a short story of what happens when a version of buzkashi (aka Afghan goat polo) comes to North America, and how sport becomes entangled in broader political and social issues. Disagreement ensues.

This story may appear in an upcoming short story anthology, though nothing is confirmed there. If not, I'll make arrangements for its publication myself. Details will follow in due course (given publication timeframes, probably not that soon).

Work on the broader rewriting of DoD continues.
 
By way of update, the short story Goats and Circles about buzkashi in the DoDverse has been tentatively accepted for one anthology, as has another DoDverse story Crown Optional, Frankness Mandatory about the establishment of the Australian monarchy. Both of those should be published in different anthologies, but I don't yet have publication dates.

In terms of rewriting DoD, things have progressed from the "cut everything which needs to be removed and/or replaced" to the "revise existing material" stage. I've just reached 50,000 words of in the publication version of DoD. This is existing material which has been rewritten for that purpose. Sometimes this just means proofing and cleaning up a bit, sometimes in means a more substantive rewrite of sections. A couple of entirely new scenes have been added, but the more substantive new scenes will wait until after I've finished revising the existing material.

Since the current version of DoD is just short of 700,000 words even after I've cut out quite a few sections, that means lots more work to go. But this is what I can confidently call progress.
 
Fantastic to hear, is the "publication" version of DoD going to be published commercially through SLP or posted?
It will be commercially published rather than posted on, say, AH.com. I can't go into more details than that at this stage, except that I plan to have all volumes from the converted timeline (probably 6, but I'm still working out how many books it needs to be divided into) ready to go before book 1 gets published, so that there won't be too long a wait between volumes.
 
It will be commercially published rather than posted on, say, AH.com. I can't go into more details than that at this stage, except that I plan to have all volumes from the converted timeline (probably 6, but I'm still working out how many books it needs to be divided into) ready to go before book 1 gets published, so that there won't be too long a wait between volumes.

I remember from years ago that you were originally planning on exploring the post war era but outside the fixed timeline so I assume the written main series will end at roughly the same point as the current version?
 
I remember from years ago that you were originally planning on exploring the post war era but outside the fixed timeline so I assume the written main series will end at roughly the same point as the current version?
A long time ago, I was planning on just writing post-timeline novels. A variety of things have persuaded me to change my mind, including (among others) how apparent it became that the world of DoD was simply too different to expect most readers to "get" it without either reading the timeline, or by making a novel so full of exposition that it became hideous.

So I've (eventually) opted to revise and publish the main timeline first. That's what I'm working on now. Post-timeline novels are a definite possibility, but I'm focusing on getting the main part finished first. (And I do have other writing projects on the go, so post-timeline novels will depend on what else is on my writing schedule.)
 
Just before we run out of 2023, I'm happy to announce that the first part of the DoDverse has been published. Goats and Circles is the story of what happens when Buzkashi (aka Afghan goat polo) comes to DoD North America. It's available in the anthology If We'd Just Got That Penalty: A Collection of Alternate History Sporting Stories (edited by Gary Oswald), just published by Sea Lion Press. (This story is set in the rewritten DoDverse, though the only consequence for this story is a small cameo by a historical character who in the original DoDverse had died by this point.)

For those who like my other main timeline, this anthology also contains a Lands of Red and Gold short story : The Red and the Grey, a tale of Tjibarri football.

The anthology is available on Amazon at the links below:

US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQHWQV67/
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CQHWQV67/
Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0CQHWQV67/
 
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