Recent content by Athelstane

This is quite good as a rewrite, and I do think it makes the incident look more plausible.

True enough.

We all recall Jacques Godechot's famous aphorism that the Bourbon dynasty and the émigrés who returned to France in their baggage train in 1814-15 had 'learnt nothing and forgotten nothing." And it was this disability that had brought down French monarchs in 1830 and 1848. All of which was well...

Indeed!

Not just him, but also Prince Robert d'Orléans, Duke of Chartres. In the ranks, wags took to calling them "Captain Parry" and "Captain Chatters." But yes, you're right, there was a lot of sympathy for the Union cause in liberal French society. In our history, Napoleon III dies in 1873. A little...

"a competent but unremarkable commander." It is interesting to put it this way. Breckinridge's true measure as a commander was, I think, somewhere between this gloss and the "New Stonewall" accolades he was collecting from Southern newspapers after New Market and Second Kernstown. He was one of...

Curious now what I missed in his postbellum career?

Harry Turtledove would approve!

Breckinridge really would be the best - even if he did not have quite as many opportunities to shine in *this* timeline's war as he did in ours - he had, after all, been vice president of the US, but also had won more votes in the South in the 1860 US presidential election than Jefferson Davis...

I have the 2012 Karen May article (PDF), by the way, if it would help.

It was during the Great War. U-boats were operating in the Atlantic, but not in the Barents Sea. It seems he wanted to steer as far clear of the war zone as he could manage.

Is it your sense that Karen May fabricated the order to Meares?

Oh, I think we have to count the Norge flight as his last expedition. (Successful enough that it is what establishes his claim to be the first man to *both* poles!) I cut Amundsen slack on his 1918-25 expeditions because he was attempting, literally, the impossible, given the state of...

He did, and it is a reasonable assessment to look at the surviving rump of the United States and still see a quite considerable industrial power (assuming it does not splinter further). But what it is now is a constrained regional power, rather than an unconstrained emerging world power...

Meanwhile, the Bonapartes suddenly have much better odds of sticking around for the rest of the century...though the broad trajectory already firmly in place by this point is towards a pretty democratic (albeit increasingly noisy) constitutional monarchy. Napoleon IV will not have nearly the...