So I've been reading this thread for the past week or so...
Wow. Amazing. Like astonishingly good. Like the best TL I've read on this site good. I'm a Nutmegger myself so I just love seeing this. I do, of course, have a few questions for Kanan. I know she's moving (hopefully to somewhere else in CT) so I don't expect all of these to be answered but it's just a bit of a wishlist:
What happened to Joe Courtney in this TL? You covered most of CT's house delegation and I'm assuming since there's very few African-descended New Englanders that Jahana Hayes had been butterflied away.
What about Abraham Ribicoff?
How did Fishers Island become part of RI as opposed to CT or even LI?
Could we see a wiki-page or box for the Hartford Whalers?
What are the demographics of NE private universities like? I assume that most UNE schools are largely New Englanders, but Yale, Harvard, MBIT etc. must admit a lot of Americans or other international students
Are there service academies for the NE military analogous to West Point? Specifically wondering about the Coast Guard since OTL's is in New London
What happened to Gideon Welles?
What about Angus King?
Is the Big E still a big deal?
Someone asked this before, but what is the status of Judaism in NE?
That's a whole bunch of questions, sorry to take up so much space, but with a TL this realistic and engaging I can't help but wonder.
Amazing work!!!
I did indeed move inside CT! I went from Torrington to a suburban town in central CT. Home renovation is still going strong. Taking longer than I'd want but...
* Joe Courtney is a former member of the New England House of Commons. He is currently a Commonwealth MP. Jahana Hayes does not exist.
* Abraham Ribicoff served as the Premier of Connecticut throughout the 1950s and 1960s. His tenure is widely credited with the rapid suburbanisation of the province, investments into suburban mass transit streetcar systems, and the leveraging of federal funds to expand the former Connecticut Route 15 into National Highway 210 with 6 lanes of traffic. Today it has 8 lanes of traffic, while National Highway 211 to the south also has 8 lanes of traffic.
* Fishers Island was allocated to Rhode Island when the colonial charter was issued for Long Island. This was done to settle a three way dispute. Connecticut claimed the island for itself, having previously administered it under the New Haven Colony, and also claimed land that Rhode Island claimed. In exchange for Rhode Island dropping land claims up to the Thames River, they were given Fishers Island.
* Hartford Whalers will come when I have time.
* New England's universities are considered some of the best on the planet. New Englanders are a slim plurality, but Commonwealth Citizens make up around 50% of the total school population, with New Englanders behind them as a single group at around 30%. The remaining 20% are Americans and other nationalities. Due to the Commonwealth Constitution, there is no process or approvals needed by any national government for students to study outside of their country of birth/residence.
* There is a Royal Navy Coast Guard academy in New London. It was inherited from the United Kingdom upon formal separation of the navy. New England has a military school in Adirondack along the St. Lawrence river, and there is a flight academy in Nova Scotia, outside of Halifax.
* Gideon Welles was an MP and served in several ministerial positions.
* Angus King is a lawyer who settled in Wisconsin.
* The Big E exists under a different name. It is held yearly in the Merrimack Valley in New Hampshire and it was known as the Great New England Agricultural Fair and Exposition, just known now as the Great E
* Antisemitism does not exist in New England as much as in other countries. There is a large and growing Jewish population due to migration from eastern Europe. Both Long Island and Massachusetts Bay have higher than national percentages of Jewish residents.
This is off topic from the election results, but I just realized that the San Francisco Bay Area is in the state of Hamilton. How does this affect Silicon Valley? BTW, nice work on this timeline
@Kanan!
Silicon Valley still exists, although it is much smaller. Tech-wise Silicon Valley needs to compete with the Vancouver-Beaconsfield Corridor in Canada and the Knowledge Corridor in New England. All three areas are huge tech hubs.
Thanks for the support!
History-wise, ITTL Stanford is butterflied away due to the founder being a New Englander (Adirondack), which is a problem unless it's replaced by a similarly prestigious analogous institution. The Bay Area would probably still be a Navy and telecom hub from the late 19th century, which helped spur the region's reputation for STEM research.
Good question for Kanan whether or not 21st-century technology ITTL is comparable to OTL, ahead of us, or behind us. The absence of WWII (and the ITTL series of different 20th-century conflicts) muddies the waters wrt to how Cold War technology races, investments, and byproducts of all that proceed.
Another political economy question is how the capitalist economy is structured in the ITTL USA. With the Social Labor party being the main left-wing force, and seemingly with roots embedded even more deeply in the early-20th century labor movement than OTL's 20th-century Democrats, I'd expect labor unions to be much more powerful ITTL than in OTL USA. Ideally this would have evolved into a system like OTL Germany's with unions well-integrated with executive boards. A side-effect could be a much less innovative venture capital scene ITTL due to labor roadblocks of the sort of labor-reducing automation and 'gig' economies that Silicon Valley companies thrive on OTL.
Additionally, the entire political landscape of the West Coast is different due to California's division (and to a lesser extent the inclusion of Baja in the state). Depending on the differences in state laws between California and Hamilton ITTL the conditions for corporate growth and development may be somewhat different.
Stanford does not exist, this has been established.
Conness University, named after one of Hamilton's most popular Governor's, John Conness, is the premier research university on the West Coast. It was founded in the early 1900s to pay tribute to the former Governor by several Chinese-American businessmen, many of whom were only able to live in the United States due to his steadfast refusal to follow California in brutal anti-Chinese immigration laws. With some of California's wealthiest immigrants financing the university, it got off to a strong start and has been going ever sense. Due to the investments made by the United States in the region, the area was still a telecommunications hub.
Technology is considered comparable, if not slightly behind due to the lack of high consumer demand for more products each year. In 2018 you can assume that your house in
Our Fair Country looks more like it did in 2008/2010 than it does now. The era of "SmartObjects" does not exist (yet), so there's no changing your thermostat on your phone.
Given the USSR's still extant nature, Communism and Capitalism both have moved towards each other. Capitalism in
Our Fair Country is based around the concept of extracting as much profit as possible while providing for the welfare of the workers. Heavy government regulations exist in most places, and is considered the norm. Free-wheeling capitalism exists (see: China, Vietnam) where there are no unions and both hyper-wealthy elites and dirt-poor workers.
Now, to the extent of how much power labour unions still have? There is a perceived disconnect between union leaders and the union rank and file. Union leaders are more likely to approve smaller wage hikes, cuts to pensions, ect. if profits fall. This isn't some utopia world where unions run factories, far from it. Union jobs and high-paying manufacturing work only exists because industrial production still exists in the United States, although it is starting to show signs of fading, ever so slightly. New England is currently considered to be going through a period of industrial downsizing, where large factories are closing shop and smaller ones are taking their place, though this means with a large number of job losses.
Automatic is still not a totally worthwhile endeavor for many industrial facilities and retailers.
Information wise Hamilton dominates due to its favourable laws and educated workforce.
Industrial wise California dominates due to its laws, uneducated (but highly skilled) workforce. California's economy is based on manufacturing, tourism, and agriculture (along with sweet, sweet, government contracts). Hi-tech manufacturing takes place in Hamilton more than California.
So will that mean Google is butterflied away as well because it originated as a Stanford project?
EDIT: I assume not, because Google Maps exists ITTL.
It is a Conness University project, for the most part. Google is located in Hamilton.
it kinda depends on how U.S.-Soviet tensions are in the 70s/80s/90s, as Larry Page would still be an American ITTL and Sergey Brin would be still be a Soviet
U.S. and Soviet tensions were much more at ease. Imagine a detente that never ends, but never gets much better than under Khrushchev.
I don't know about this. It's certainly possible for someone to move from New England to the US ITTL, especially with the promise of gold in California. And this timeline seems to be pretty lax with butterflies (not that that's necessarily a bad thing).
This happens often, and if you check you will find New Englanders in the USA and vice-versa in this TL. The ones I highlight as remaining in New England are mostly significant for some reason.
Right. I said it because I'm fairly certain that Kanan has said Stanford was never founded. One thing Kanan has been fairly consistent about is that many Americans who originated in New England are no longer part of ITTL USA, even if their families could still have migrated to the states. There was no such thing as hard borders until the 20th-century afterall, but that's clearly been a part of TTL. Many products of Stanford (i.e. Google) can be fairly easily (if with some contrivance) willed back into existence with an analogous ITTL college based in the Bay Area taking over the role.
I personally think that a lot of the Great Lakes region would still have been populated by New Englanders ITTL as in OTL, especially due to the two decade earlier Erie Canal connection ITTL. And I definitely agree that the Gold Rush would have attracted thousands of New Englanders to California. But that's just my musing, not Kanan's canon.
I actually wonder why she renamed Portland, Oregon/Columbia to Beaconsfield. The town was originally settled by New Englanders OTL and the naming was a competition between Bostonian and Portlander emigres. IDK why it wouldn't still have happened if both regions were part of the British Empire.
In general the borders between the United States and the British Empire were harder, but this is more due to the more favourable economic conditions in the Empire than in the United States, which had the stigma of an unstable freehwheeling republic for some time compared to stoic, sturdy economic growth in New England/Canada.
Beaconsfield's history is fairly long and complex. The first settlers in lower Columbia came via means of the
Columbia Trail originating in the United States in the 1830s. The Columbia Territory had been legally open to Americans since the Treaty of 1819 under President Jefferson allowed limited trapping rights for furs in the territory, so long as they were done under the auspices of the Hudson Bay Company (HBC). This barred the American Fur Company from competing here, and led it to go broke in the late 1820s. Due to the policies of the HBC and the British, migration into the territory was low. A change of policy arrived in Britain, and legislation was passed granting up to 20% of the fur trade to be controlled by non-HBC entities, which led to the establishment of the Columbia Fur Company (CFC) in New York City as a joint venture of American capital. Settlers moved west steadily in the early 1830s, and fearing stiff competition and potential loss of both revenue and control of the region, the HBC founded
Fort Vancouver along the Columbia River. As Americans began to arrive in the Willamette Valley, the HBC also founded
Fort William along the Williamette River on the spot where a creek dumps into the river (this is now known as Mill Creek).
The two forts were sizable settlements for the time. The settlement founded by John McLoughlin near the confluence of the Clackamas River began to flourish, and McLoughlin encouraged increased American settlement in the region, at times willfully disobeying the orders from the HBC by even seeking out CFC contracts and assisting the establishment of American-owned logging firms and contracts. Oregon City, as it was known, was the last stop of the
Columbia Trail and was considered by many to be an "American" city deep in British territory. Seeing the possibility that the Americans could feasibly control the Willamette River, the British themselves built a second fort a few miles away from Fort Vancouver called
Fort Resolve at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia. This settlement would be the final taxation and governing body of all marine traffic into the Columbia and out to the sea. At the same time, the British briefly formed the Colony of Willamette, which split the territory off from the Columbia district and rested administration with Fort Resolve, showing their seriousness in maintaining the territory.
The Willamette Colony was Britain's successful attempt to hold complete control over the region, just as in the 1840s immigration peaked from the United States. Despite some local clamourings to become American territory, the lack of interest by Presidents Clay or Calhoun in the British territory saw this sentiment gradually fade away as British control became more and more solidified. The Willamette Colony would last until 1868, when it was merged into the Colony of British Columbia, which then entered the Canadian Confederation as the Province of Columbia. Fort Resolve was considered as the capital of British Columbia, but this ultimately fell to Victoria on Vancouver Island.
After the very popular Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, died in 1881, Fort Resolve voted to change its name to Beaconsfield after then Prime Minister John Macdonald voiced support for Canadians celebrating the life of the great statesman. There was also support from James Grant, the future Prime Minister of Canada after Macdonald, who strongly supported changing the name of his city to Beaconsfield.
While the Great Lakes does have a New Englander history, there was less than OTL, due to land being more easily available in Adirondack, Ontario, and Quebec for general use for British citizens. However, any identity or old heritage (eg New England town greens/style of local government) has long been erased (well, maybe not the town greens, that's the one echo of the region's past) has been washed away with the incredibly heavy German migration the Midwest/Great Lakes experienced.
Without Stanford (which butterflies away Elon Musk, Google, etc) and a New England-based Facebook, an infobox or a wikipage on the Bay Area/Silicon Valley will be quite interesting.
Facebook was formally based out of Hamilton, but has since announced a move to Columbia.
