Recent content by Montanian

I've never seen this map before but it's odd when you think about what it covers. At the time it would cut off U.S. access overland to both Mormon settlements in Utah, California (Trail), Oregon (Trail) as it includes South Pass through the Rockies that imminent wagon trains relied on and the...

It is odd since potatoes, corn/maize, and sweet potatoes come from the Americas by the 1600's (potatoes & sweet potatoes from Peru/Bolivia and corn from Mexico and North America.) There's several thousand varieties of potatoes developed by the tribes before the Incas, Chacopoyan, Chimu, etc...

Brown would have been an interesting candidate with far more of a track record pro and con that was readily available to national media (since they like to go to California and know people there as opposed to the unknown and distant land of Arkansas that allowed Clinton to mostly proclaim...

Comics were a very random target in the 1950's (like Frederic Wertham's aim and thinking, more about self-promotion than real insight into juvenile delinquency.) Your POD of his timely demise probably ends the push, or leaves it back on pulp magazines, paperback novels, movies, mainstream...

If you read Edwin Black's excellent "Internal Combustion" history of how the current vehicle technology standards were established (far more random than inevitable so many POD's), the POD away from oil is probably in the 1890's when electric and steam-powered vehicles were surprisingly...

The Mormon migration arriving in Texas, a vast place, would likely go to an empty part of the state, most of it, and avoid conflict that way (i.e. if you live in Denmark, Southern Italians or Ukrainians rarely walk or ride up en masse to throw yo out.) Arriving in the Republic of Texas with...

The Ojibwe/Chippewa was the bigger, tougher tribe that had chased the Dakota/Lakota/Nakota out of Canada and the Upper Midwest out onto far more desolate high Northern plains so an alliance would be very unlikely with centuries of warfare and raids between them. This is marginal country that...

It is an intriguing question but other advanced countries full of nice people and robust institutions have taken sudden and sharp new turns that made them pariahs. Some POD's (vague): 1. Australia is a success in exporting Communism to it in the 1920's or 30's and the Communists gain a...

Eisenhower spent the late 1930's as MacArthur's executive officer in the Phillipines, doing the work and covering for a boss who sounds like he was getting senile by then or at least very erratic. Without Eisenhower there, MacArthur might find Sutherland earlier for the role, Sutherland doing...

Eisenhower was in the US throughout World War I, working on tank development so an accidental death amidst moving machinery, experimental explosives, engine fires and fueling accidents, would be a very reasonable POD. The U.S. had hundreds of commanders, over 300 ahead of Ike in seniority in...

Interesting, had no idea Goddard's bazooka was being demonstrated in 1918. Beyond anti-tank uses, in World War I it seems like it would be quite useful against machine gun nests, pillboxes and other strong points, massed attacks on the forts that anchored the trench systems and often contained...

The firing on Fort Sumter is a lot more several minor mistakes with a catastrophic chain reaction than a deliberately provocative element, and so could occur at any federal facility on rebel soil (Harpers Ferry Arsenal, St. Louis Arsenal, Norfolk Naval Yard, the New Orleans forts, or if Maryland...

Ivan Van Sertima has a book on possible African voyages back and forth to South America that came out before the Egyptian mummies were found to have cocaine and nicotine usage indicators, years of it, showing a reliable trade was going on for a long time. Van Sertima makes particularly...

Charlie Duff's new book "Detroit, An American Autopsy" looks a lot at "why" Detroit has it so bad and traces it back at least to the mid-1960's with cascading and reinforcing bad decisions and endemic corruption (so not that different from NYC or Albany for that matter the past 180 years or...

America cutting off war production sales in 1914 would have affected the million plus infantry rifles ordered by the British, Russians, and Belgian Armies (but not machine guns, artillery, radios, field telephones, combat aircraft (oddly)) along with millions of horses, some trucks and staff...