Whites of Spanish and Italian Ancestry also tend to associate with people from Latin American countries if they are not pushing to be recognized as whites.
What is a common thing or trope that always seem to happen?
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In the present yes but previously to 1970-1980 not, and in many cases is the US government who insists on classifying them as Latinos so as not to include them in the white category. People associating themselves with that name is a much more recent development, from 1980-1990 at the earliest.
Specifically, people who identify as Hispanic/Latino but not with one of the limited number of racial categories are treated as white. Everyone is counted on two otherwise independent dimensions: race and ethnicity (Hispanic/Latino vs. Not Hispanic/Latino).
And while a logical application of the one-drop rule would say that a Spaniard, who can be assumed to have dark-skinned ancestors from Africa in historical times, would be black, that's not how it works. Spain is a European nation, so its ethnics are white. (Older classifications might not say so, but those come from a time when "foreigner" superseded biological judgment.)
Do they? I'm curious. I've never seen the idea of Latino as relevant. But then again, my country has never seen itself as Latin American. The last survey, 4% of people in my country identified as Latino. Maybe it's a US thing?
AFAIK one-drop rules don't apply to U.S. citizenship nowadays so not sure how much it matters unless you are referring to private demographic social opinions. Which are not as racist as people automatically assume (but bit not racist either but idgaf and I don't want to go deeper in this topic lol)
Something that frustrates me in stories is seeing people put way too much emphasis on history being determined based on the state of royal families and ignore how factors like economy, climate, disease, etc can impact how kingdoms and empires function. Like no having such and such marry so and so isn’t going to necessarily radically alter the shape of the world just by that.
Personally, I find most disturbing about this the assumption that this marriage will determine political alliances, when the opposite is true.
We repeatedly see cases of countries going to war anyway even though, in theory, having real marriages means they should be allied. Worse, in many cases this marriage has been used as the pretext to start a war.
As for climate and economics, I would say that the problem is not that it is not addressed, but that it is addressed in a very limited way.
Address of economics typically assume that all inhabitants of all countries have as their primary obsession making money, will ignore anything that cannot be expressed in amounts of money, and will happily give up all their principles and beliefs if you tell them that they stand between them and hypothetical financial gains.
Address of climate is typically limited to countries deciding for poorly developed reasons to promote policies whose sole goal seems to be to avoid or minimize the development of OTL climate change, even if they have no reason to BELIEVE or even KNOW that this problem exists.
The issue is more apparent for Before 1900 scenarios. Granted, only recently are people able to get more information on how climate impacted history since a lot of history books don't really address the impact of climate on global politics. This is a very overlooked topic in general so I am charitable about it. The internet has at least made sure that it is way easier to find out about this stuff.
I think political marriages serving as a powerful tool works in medieval settings, I mean thats how we got Austria with the Spanish Empire, but that doesnt mean the citizens and - specially - the nobility of the countries in question will simply accept it, and the closer a TL is to the modern age the less political marriages matter to the point where we saw an entire World War being fought among what was essencially the same family
Yeah, that’s why in before 1900 climate really needs to be taken as a factor for major historical events. Overlooking is more forgivable for after 1900 since (so far) there’s not much stuff about climate influencing major historical events.
Well, the reason why I don't really try to make alternate history is that, I believe historical events were mostly inevitable, due to being results of climate, sociology, economy, human behavior, etc, instead of political, royal or military figures doing something differently. There were obviously individuals who had the capacity to influence their surroundings and entire nations, but imo, those were more affected by the "potential of being influenced" rather than the individual changing their nation solo.
I get that this sort of climatic/natural/social alternate history scenarios are outright ASB for rightful reasons, and to be honest, alternate history wouldn't be fun if butterflies didn't exist, so I respect every alternate history content creator, despite not even having spoke in this subforum before this message.
TLDR personal rant / nitpicking about plausibility of althists in general
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I think this veers way too far in the other direction to heavily favor determinism. For me, the fact that the social sciences are having issues with replicating experiments is significant evidence that even given an identical environment (in the climate, politics, economy, etc.), people will behave differently. Enough people behave differently at any level of society, and change and divergences are possible even outside of talking about "Great Men". Even beyond the replicability crisis, studies only talk about statistical intervals of confidence and averages, which also suggests significant variation in human behavior.
I also subscribe to Karl Popper's argument against historical determinism too. Cribbing a summary of Popper's argument in The Poverty of Historicism from rationalwiki:
- The biggest historical changes in recent history have for the most part been caused by technological changes. If you could get somebody who lived a hundred years ago to time travel to the present, the most striking differences would probably be technological ones, and even if that is not the case, many of the social, cultural and political changes can at least in part be ascribed to changes in technology.
- Technological progress depends heavily on scientific progress.
- Therefore, in order to predict the future, one should be able to predict future scientific knowledge.
- It is, however, not possible to predict future scientific knowledge. You can't predict a scientific fact that has not been discovered yet. If you could, it would not be a future discovery but a current one. In other words, if you know a fact that is not yet known, you know it now, so it's not a prediction any more. Knowing things you don't know yet is an impossible logical contradiction.
- Therefore, it is not possible to predict the future course of history
Of course, we're verging on philosophical differences at this point.
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Disagree. Choices that people make can also impact how history goes. This view removes human agency in how they make their decisions in history.
Moreover, although Tooze fans may believe otherwise, there is abundant evidence that many historical events, from large changes to small decisions, had more to do with "political figures doing things" (even if in many cases this works because these figures have followers who listen to them) than with "economics" or "climate."
I agree with you. For example if Marius or Sulla had not existed or had made different choices, then Julius Caesar's life would have been very different, and that in turn would have had a knock on effect on people like Brutus, Octavian, Mark Antony and so forth. The Republic might not have become the Principate, or might have done so at a different time or in a different way. Egypt might have retained independence. So might Gaul. Or Britain. So many things would have been different, all because of a few decisions made by two men at the turn of the 2nd-1st centuries BCE.