alternatehistory.com

Faraday invents alternating current in the 1830's

It takes 20 years for an industry to fully develop

High historical inertia

Civil War occurs in 1860's as in OTL

1. electrification is big in the South in a way factorization was not

2. the industrial boom of electricity in the South created more free blacks and laws for the human treatment of slaves in many states

3. the electrification of the South helps it to better resist the North, giving more time for black Confederate regiments to be formed

4. the Civil War ends with the North successful but Southerners feeling closer, rather than farther apart, to their black neighbors. Southern blacks are also just as likely to be skilled workers as field hands and make up in technical training what they have been lacking in classical education. Less African Americans immigrate North to the big cities and instead work to rebuild and to build up the cities of the South. Conflict in the South is more likely to be regional (Appalachian "backstabbers" versus Dixie-landers) than racial.

5. Appalachian areas are even more resistant to change than in OTL, with West Virginia miner riots much worst and little to no industrial buildup in parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee unlike the rest of the South which grows to rival the North.

6. Due to bastion of support in Appalachia, diffuse socialist and anarchist movements in the United States put up more of a fight against unionbusters. This leads to more and more violent confrontations from the Wild West to the early 1900's W.Va. miner revolts to the homefront communism of the 1930's during the Great Depression, starting with Appalachian participation in the Haymarket affair in the 1880's (the longer war is made up for in the shortened time to industrialize.

7. Wobblies ride this notoriety to maintained prominence and large membership throughout the forties, fifties, and up to the sixties where they influence the anti-war counter-cultural movement and are in turn influenced.

8. Thus Hippie and Hillbilly are seen as similar as often as not, rather than antithetical and results in seventies movement revivalist communes in Appalachia many of which are raided by the federal government - prolonging the countercultural "war" at home longer than in OTL.

9. This spirals into the war on drugs as marijuana and opium farms in the Appalachians are attacked in the late seventies and the eighties.

10. The careers of liberal hillbilly Willie Nelson and Southern liberal Bill Clinton are even more successful than in OTL due to more supporters and the mainstream anxiety against hipbillies having died out by the nineties.

11. The Hipbilly archetype and the archetype of the African-American Technician are alive and strong in TTL.

12. Technology overall is more advanced in TTL worldwide than in OTL.
Top