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  1. WI: Texas keeps all its land

    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...

  2. Why no potatos in Chinese Manchuria?

    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...

  3. Brown/Rockefeller VS Bush/Quayle '92

    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...

  4. DBWI: EC comics shuts down in the 50's

    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...

  5. Can oil be replaced by an alternative resource?

    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...

  6. WI: Texas is the Mormon Heartland

    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...

  7. WI: Larger and More Successful Sioux Uprising in 1862

    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...

  8. AHC: Australia a Rogue State

    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...

  9. WI: No Dwight Eisenhower?

    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...

  10. WI: No Dwight Eisenhower?

    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...

  11. What if Goddard "Bazooka" in WW I ?

    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...

  12. WI no Fort Sumter?

    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...

  13. Abubakri II of Mali arrives in South America

    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...

  14. How Bad Could 70s/80s NYC Get?

    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...

  15. America cuts off loans to belligerents in 1914

    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...

  16. WI: Geli Raubal kills Adolf Hitler

    Ron Rosenbaum's superb book on the Munich years, "Explaining Hitler" made a persuasive case for Hitler having killed her in a jealous rage, the evidence he cited made that more likely. If we look at other such organizations then and now, they often do collapse when the charismatic leader's...

  17. For Want of a Missourian

    Henry Wallace, unlike Truman, had been part of the oversight team on the Manhattan Project since it's inception and been tasked with finding resources/feedstocks for U.S. war production (for which Manhattan had first priority thanks to him.) So I think he would have been ready to use them in...

  18. Max US mobilization?

    Machine Tools are vastly faster to set up and change what they're making in very small batches many times a shift, think Computer Numerically Controlled Nine Axis Milling Machines that replace 10,000 sq. ft of manual machine tools each with a skilled operator inflexibly making lower quality...

  19. The Government does nothing in 2008

    It's an interesting POD to contemplate. A. Hank Paulson and others in the administration who'd come from Goldman Sachs and imagined the whole world revolves around them would have to have been replaced. Sheila Bair from FDIC, Elizabeth Warren from Harvard Law's Bankruptcy Chair, Warren Buffet...

  20. Max US mobilization?

    Agriculture takes less than 1% of the U.S. population and manufacturing's less than 16% with far higher productivity per worker than previous wars (only about half of U.S. production capacity in 1942-45 went to war production, the rest remained on consumer and business production which made a...
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