US foreign policy with larger America.

In the Caribbean I can see, but why in the far northern regions? It's orders of magnitude easier to clear and level an area for an airport without dense forests in the way.

Because the runways that exist up there are not good for conventional airliners. A Boeing 737 wouldn't be able to handle most northern runways, too rough and too likely to be covered in debris. Building a runway on permafrost is a pain in the backside in more ways than one.
 
Because despite what so many people say the U.S is not a magical all-devouring empire that can conquer and integrate all of North America totally flawlessly in every timeline as a universal constant.

IN all seriousness though, is in itself a federation, and it's system of organization bears a number of similarities, and as I pointed out, it has 31 states IOTL and every one of them has a bigger population than a few smallest US ones.
 
Re: the Great Migration and blacks, two things:

1. I could easily imagine oppressed blacks from the former slave states heading to black-majority parts of the Caribbean if they can. Good luck imposing Jim Crow there.

2. Caribbean blacks emigrating into the former slave states are likely to be oppressed even worse than Southern blacks were. Of course, now I'm thinking you might end up complicating the caste system in the South--bigots might take one look at practitioners of Santeria and decide Christian "American" blacks are a lesser evil.

("Damn it, at least our n*****s are Christian! None of this goat-head crap!")
 
How is the U.S. going to ever get away with incorporating HAITI?

The early U.S. was EXTREMELY hostile toward Haiti and by the time that ended, Haiti's national identity is pretty well-established. Any attempt to occupy the country long-term is going to be a vast running sore and it's not like they'll be lacking for sympathizers in the U.S. itself.

Unless you get rid of slavery really early (as Faeelin's Revolution-era "To Set A County Free" timeline seems to be going), you're not going to have Haiti joining the U.S. to form one big happy multiracial republic standing up to foreign despots.
 

Deleted member 14881

maybe a weird protectorate thing, Merry although this US ould probably be more racist
 
Here's what I figure will happen with the states:

50 States - The 50 OTL American states
2 States - America's Pacific Islands and Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands
10 States - Canada's 10 provinces, with Prince Edward Island merged into New Brunswick and the three territories merged into one
32 States - OTL Mexico's 31 states and Federal District
7 States - The Central American nations (Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, Belize)
8 States - Caribbean nations (Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Leeward Islands and the Windward Islands)

This makes 109 States. You may be able to narrow down a few of these, but all the Mexican States are bigger than the smallest of American States and the only Central American nation that's smaller is Belize, which is English speaking and thus much more difficult to merge with any surrounding states, which are all Spanish speaking.

A lot of those states wouldn't exist in the past, and/or were created for political reasons that wouldn't necessarily exist in this timeline.

For instance, Mexico only had 20 states and territories in the 1820s (including Texas, California, and New Mexico), excluding those in central America. Belize was sparsely populated for much of its history, and might get folded into Yucatan or Guatemala, just like how the Mosquito Coast was annexed by Nicaragua OTL. And that's assuming that Belize even exists in the first place, hardly a given assuming a POD in the 1770s. Going back that far, Vermont might wind up as a part of New Hampshire, instead of becoming its own state. New Brunswick and Halifax were part of Nova Scotia prior to the 1790s.

Things get even worse when you bring national politics into it. With Canada and the US territories controlled by a single government, the western borders will likely look different than OTL. Heck, this US, with Canadian states from the start, might not have the great political struggles over the expansion of slavery in the west, meaning radically changed borders there. In a different Civil War (or without one), you don't have a West Virginia.

The 50 state borders of OTL are anything but sacrosanct. Change the politics and you change the states as well. Just a few nudges and one could easily have the OTL continental US having a dozen less states.

And, would one find all of these small islands becoming states? Some might remain territories, others might be forced to consolidate rather than being approved as states in their own right.

I agree on this point, and I'm thinking that Spanish-language education starts entering curriculums on elementary school levels in the United States the 1930s in an attempt to improve the communications skills of Americans, starting in states which will have sizable Spanish-speaking populations. English will have started to have been taught in Spanish-speaking states much earlier, of course, but the reverse will be considerable by the 1930s. (It's also is a way of putting people back to work during the depression.) French would be in the same boat by the end of WWII, particularly in the survivalist instincts that so many French Canadians had remains. As the effects of multiculturalism take hold after WWII, education in Spanish and French expands dramatically, to the point that by the 1970s most American school children get instruction in a second language in elementary and high school, and lots of schools teach them for people who wish to learn for business or cultural reasons, as you point out.

Just pointing this out again, but Spanish wasn't the primary language among the bulk of the Mexican and Central American population in the early 1800s. If there is a "local language" revival in the 20th century, it would likely be more along the lines of Nahuatl or K'iche' than Spanish.
 
I'm just not buying Canadian provinces undivided.

Every one of them is at least twice the size of Alaska.

IMO, Ontario & Quebec each virtually must be divided in two, & there's a good argument for it in BC, too.

Not to mention the desire to split the territorial power between state governments (which is part of the reason Canada's Northwest Territory was divided into Manitoba, Saskatchewan, & Alberta to begin with). I see no reason DC would do different.

Yes, once you get north of about 55, you may get large, virtually unpopulated territories. South of that, IMO, you're going to get lo pop-density states like Montana & the Dakotas--& lots of them.
 
Just pointing this out again, but Spanish wasn't the primary language among the bulk of the Mexican and Central American population in the early 1800s. If there is a "local language" revival in the 20th century, it would likely be more along the lines of Nahuatl or K'iche' than Spanish.

Indeed. 60 percent of the population in Mexico spoke an indigenous language, not Spanish as their primary tongue and I imagine it would be either a similar figure or a bit higher in the Central American countries. That alone could be interesting to have revivals of the bigger Native American languages in this larger USA, especially in southern Mexico.
 

Rex Mundi

Banned
I'm just not buying Canadian provinces undivided.

Every one of them is at least twice the size of Alaska.

IMO, Ontario & Quebec each virtually must be divided in two, & there's a good argument for it in BC, too.

Not to mention the desire to split the territorial power between state governments (which is part of the reason Canada's Northwest Territory was divided into Manitoba, Saskatchewan, & Alberta to begin with). I see no reason DC would do different.

Yes, once you get north of about 55, you may get large, virtually unpopulated territories. South of that, IMO, you're going to get lo pop-density states like Montana & the Dakotas--& lots of them.

Canada has 33 million people, while California has 38. You take your two senators like a man and be bloody grateful.
 
Rex Mundi said:
Canada has 33 million people, while California has 38. You take your two senators like a man and be bloody grateful.
Montreal alone has more than Delaware.:p Or Montana.:p (Edmonton damn near does.:p)

Tell me again how there shouldn't be a state with a city bigger than 70% of Montana or 90% of Delaware...
 
maybe a weird protectorate thing, Merry although this US ould probably be more racist

In order to function, this U.S. would have to be less racist--if they were more racist, it'd be more likely to collapse.

The Comanche, one of if not the strongest Native American tribe, were only around 40,000 at their high point they weren't even an organized, unified polity. The U.S. could get away with treating the Indians badly like it did because there were so few of them (especially after the diseases hit--cholera killed half the Comanche) and they were for the most part rather primitive.

There are millions of Mexicans and they're probably going to have a lot more sympathizers in the U.S. proper (i.e. Irish Catholics--look up the "San Patricios" sometime). The U.S. can't treat Mexicans like crap, not if they want to be able to avoid gigantic uprisings, unrest, civil war, etc.

Of course, the U.S. might learn this lesson only at the cost of losing Mexico, so maybe an early POD would be better.
 
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