So we know France is engaging in some very (let's say rude) mass deportation tactics and still has imperialism turned ON. But what about Germany? How has it's government functioned since the Civil war? How has it treted minorities? And what exactly happened in said Civil war?
I'll work on Germany by the weekend. France (and to some extent, Britain) never really left the 1930s imperial mindset, and it's just been "adapted" to the modern era. For example, Hong Kong, despite being bordered by the much less scary KMT China (now Democratic China) is still part of Britain, mostly because Britain forced the Chinese to surrender it in perpetuity in order to assist the KMT in defeating the Communists. So the official handover date came and went and life continued as normal, so this man:
Is quiet happy.
Thank you for answering! Good to see "Banned in Boston" won't be a thing ITTL.
I hope I am not bombarding you with questions but does ESPN (founded and based in Bristol, CT) exist ITTL? If so, does it have the same ratings dominance in New England ITTL that it did until recently (
damn you Fox News!) in the United States IOTL?
ESPN is the primary broadcaster of Cricket, Formula 1, and MLB. It also has a contract deal to show some NAFL and NHL games, but is by far not the main broadcast channel of these sports. It also has a near monopoly on sports commentary and analysis. ESPN is to New England what TSN is to Canada.
Here's a challenge: show me a picture of the Plymouth or Long Island Parliament building without stealing some other state or provinces Parliament/Legislative Building.
Long Island General Assembly
Plymouth General Court
Close, but Long Island's capital in in Southampton, not Brooklyn.
That... actually sounds pretty cool. I guess that New York's politics are very distinct from OTL, the state often seen as fairly pro-British and especially pro-Yankee compared to the rest of the country given how much of its economy rests on trade with New England both downstate and upstate. There are probably a lot of jokes in the rest of the US about New York being "New England's thirteenth province", not unlike Michigan being "Canada's eleventh province" in OTL, only perhaps even moreso, and not entirely joking.
And given the lack of the New England states to support the Union war effort (though I'd imagine the sentiments being very much pro-Union), it makes sense that the Civil War would be even longer and bloodier than OTL, especially with the West Coast becoming a theater of battle due to Southern California being its own state. Which, in turn, would've gotten the native tribes and Mormons of the West dragged into the war, likely trying to play the Union and Confederacy off of each other or resisting both, and the Union and Confederacy in turn trying to woo them to their side and fight those who support the enemy. The Civil War in the West would've been a far more complicated affair.
Speaking of Mormons, given that Joseph Smith was a Vermonter, I'd imagine the Latter-Day Saints movement having quite a few butterflies. I see that they still wound up in the Utah area, going by the state of Deseret on the US map, but the route they took to get there likely went very differently.
Also, concerning the Civil War, I noticed that West Florida was cited as having seceded, yet (East) Florida was not. That's likely to be an interesting story of how it happened; I guess they had a Sam Houston-like figure as governor who kept it in the Union? Florida would've been under siege the entire war, and afterwards, there likely would've been quite a bit of mythmaking about how it stayed loyal to the Union. Between that and most of the Panhandle being part of West Florida, something tells me that Florida proper, after the Sun Belt boom, will probably be considered even more culturally "Northern" than in OTL. I take it that the war is also how East Tennessee came to be, like OTL's West Virginia? (It says it was granted statehood in 1869, so I'm guessing yes.)
New York is a very different place. There's no "blue oasis" among the "sea of red" that is upstate New York, so the northern reaches are very, very conservative (think central Pennsylvania) and swing heavily to the Nationals. Combine this with maybe-but-not-quite-but-sometimes-maybe competitive suburbs of Manhattan you get the chance of New York being a swing state. Keep in mind, there's no Brooklyn or Queens, so it is quite a competitive state. All the while Staten Island desperately tries to pretend it's its own state. Given that there is
some difficulty of getting between New England and the United States, Staten Island is basically Greenwich, CT. A bunch of small towns where the uber rich go (Without the Hamptons, they had to go somewhere to holiday, and it sure as
shit wasn't going to be
New Jersey). This makes New York swingy with a crappy Social Labor candidate and a strong National candidate.
But yes, the whole "New York values" thing carries over really well. Manhattan and Westchester (the city) are ethnically diverse, and lean very much to the left. They would be solid Labour voting blocs and help form the left of the Social Labor party (impressive, given that S-L is already to the left of the OTL democratic party). This gives New York the "evil socialists" charge from other, less uh, progressive states.
I'm going to work on the U.S. Civil War one of these days. I studied it a lot in school, but it wasn't my concentration (Latin American history ho-boy am I gunna have fun when I move on to South America). So I can write somewhat intelligently on it, I might even start now and pull back from the purely "modern news updates" of New England (mostly because while there is some instability in the government, there's not going to be a general election in, you know, april) and focus on u.s. history more. But, in general, it was a clusterf*ck.
West Florida was a state at the time of the Civil War. Florida itself was still a territory, because the only populated part of that entire region was the panhandle, which is what became it's own state in ~1800s (no one is really quite sure, West Florida was made a territory under the Articles of Confederation, but it signed the Constitution as a state despite never being a state under the Articles. The U.S. was a mess.) So what happened with Florida is that the Confederates basically took Jacksonville from their locations in Savannah, said to hell with the rest of the swampy territory, and watched in sorrow as the Florida Keys fell under the control of the Union, until they too came and kicked the rebels out of Florida. This is, in lore, how Tampa and Key West grew, because they were "loyal" to the Union and the United States just decided to send an ass ton of men there to make sure they controlled it (granted ass ton for a useless swamp like Florida was, you know, 1,000 men). But yes, Florida is basically "northeast South," where the real growth came from Henry Flager's railroad and settlement of Tampa and the Atlantic Coast. It's also very likely that a ton of freedmen also made their way into Florida, where they could establish their own lives. In this regard, I would image Florida is a whole different state than the one we know.
East Tennessee came around just like West Virginia. This time with more loyal Union boys and Bobby Lee raising the stars and stripes over Knoxville.
U.S. General Robert E. Lee (1807-1870)
