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--- timelines:empty_america [2018/04/27 13:54] – [TL-related trivia] petike
+++ timelines:empty_america [2021/05/21 20:56] (current) – [Links] petike
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 ====== Empty America ======
-A very old but finished timeline by Doug Hoff, already started in the glory days of the now non-existant [[offtopic:soc-history-what-if|Social History What If]] website (AH.com's precursor).
+A very old but finished timeline by Doug Hoff, already started in the glory days of the now non-existent [[offtopic:soc.history.what-if]] discussion newsgroup (AH.com's precursor).
+----
+==== Premise and POD ====
+For whatever ASB reasons, humans never migrated to the Americas in prehistoric times. As a result, medieval explorers from the Old World - both from the West and East - find the New World to be a wilderness completely unaffected by man, still populated by many peculiar species of prehistoric megafauna. Meanwhile, in the Old World, the Mongol invasions of this timeline take on a different, more successful course... These two events contribute to reshaping the geopolitical, cultural and even technological landscape of the world in the following centuries. Creating a world both quite familiar, but also rather alien.
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 **[[http://web.archive.org/web/20050203014317/www.althist.com/|Doug Hoff's original alternate history site, Althist.com]]** - Doug's original site has been defunct since the late 2000s, this is a version archived at Archive.org, available via its WaybackMachine. The site includes at least some of the timeline (the author's largest by far), but probably nothing of the chapters written in later years.
-In the late 2000s, you could also read the timeline in its entirety via links on [[http://emptyamerica.blogspot.com/|this purpose-made blog]] by Doug Hoff himself. However, with even the Google groups incarnation of [[offtopic:soc-history-what-if|SHWI]] going under in the 2010s, the original posts with the timeline are now by and large inaccessible.
+In the late 2000s, you could also read the timeline in its entirety via links on [[http://emptyamerica.blogspot.com/|this purpose-made blog]] by Doug Hoff himself. However, with even the Google groups incarnation of [[offtopic:soc.history.what-if|SHWI]] going under in the 2010s, the original posts with the timeline are now by and large inaccessible.
-**[[https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/attachments/1292_d1-gif.235145/|A map of the Empty America TL in 1292 AD]]** - Map courtesy of [[offtopic:Scarecrow]], 2005.
+**[[https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/a-map-thread.10468/page-254#post-687645|A map of the Empty America TL in 1292 AD]]** - Map courtesy of [[offtopic:Scarecrow]], 2005.
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 The TL mentions //Megaloceros// living in the empty North America. Unless these large deer migrated there (despite humans not having migrated to the Americas in the TL's prehistory), //Megaloceros// shouldn't be there. In [[alternate history:OTL]], they were a purely Eurasian species of deer. An Old World deer species migrating to the Americas in an ATL, but prehistoric humans not managing the same, rather strains believability. However, this is just a minor error.
+Another possible error on Doug Hoff's part is identifying Newfoundland as Markland. Contemporary historians generally surmise that the Markland described by the Scandinavians who visited North America was probably Labrador, with Vinland being Newfoundland. Doug explicitly positions his story's Vinland in OTL New Brunswick and the areas to the north. Of course, given the relative vagueness of the Scandinavians' oral tradition about their visit, it's hard to precisely pinpoint which region was which. Given the alternate timeline, it's possible the generic terms of the Scandinavians could be applied to several areas of North America's coastal northeast.
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