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  1. Cologne-wank

    Are there interesting timelines in which Cologne stays something like the primate city of Germany? It was the biggest city in the Holy Roman Empire until well into the 16th century. It was too far inland to ever be a maritime entrepot like Antwerp or Amsterdam - IIRC the main competitors to...

  2. WI Alexander lived

    Is there a good TL, or discussion (here or elsewhere), about what would have happened if Alexander hadn't died young? Could a Hellenistic empire covering his entire territory have survived for a couple generations?

  3. Examples of stasis

    This thread in After 1900 talks about stasis in specific modern technologies, like video players. More generally, there's a trope common in genre fantasy of medieval stasis, in which society stays at High-to-Late Medieval technology for thousands of years. My question is about real or plausible...

  4. A more rail-oriented US

    Technically the POD is somewhere in the late 1890s, but it's a TL about the 20th century. https://twitter.com/alon_levy/status/1177938487062007816 In OTL, there's a strict separation of urban and suburban rail in North America (unlike in Germany, or Japan); even today there's a culture in...

  5. WI: United Capitalist Postwar Germany

    I tweeted this storm a couple weeks ago: https://twitter.com/alon_levy/status/1181474601504780288 Please don't nitpick the AHC aspect of how the WAllies end the war by February 1945 - the case of interest is how Germany evolves later, with a unified Berlin, an iron curtain roughly matching...

  6. WI: Anne Frank survives the Holocaust

    Anne Frank was interned at a concentration camp rather than sent to the gas chambers; she died 2-3 months before the end of the war, probably of typhus. So the question is, if she survives Bergen-Belsen, what happens?

  7. Meta: genocide and other atrocities in TLs

    When you write TLs, how do you handle genocide? Do you try to make it go as in OTL? (So, for example, your WW1 POD might still lead to the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust.) Do you include genocides but with other nations involved? If so, do you deliberately try to reverse things (e.g...

  8. AHC: a Richer Japan

    Japan's economy is infamously not doing very well. It was converging to Western labor productivity levels until 1990, but since then has been stuck at two-thirds the US level. It's about as rich as France, both with about 70% the US's GDP per capita, but France has very short working hours...

  9. Nuclear power: WI Truman doesn't drop the bomb

    WI the US decides not to use nuclear weapons at the end of WW2? Note: I'm not looking for a discussion of whether Japan surrenders more or less on schedule or not; if it's important, then assume it does, as many serious historians believe and many serious people believed even in real time. My...

  10. 19c Railroad AHCs

    Some key dates about railroad history: 1825 is the first intercity railway (Stockton and Darlington). 1830 is the first all-steam intercity railway (Liverpool and Manchester). 1863 is the first metro line (the Metropolitan line in London, mostly under the New Road). The main AHC is to give...

  11. Muslim Age of Sail: shipboard drinking

    It is well-known that, a) The Medieval and Early Modern eras saw extensive seafaring by Muslims, such as Arabs, Swahilis, and Malays, and Islam forbids drinking alcohol; and b) In the Age of Sail, European ship crews drank large amounts of alcohol, which preserved better than fresh water on...

  12. AHC: wank India with a late POD

    In 1990, India was still a hair richer than China. Today, India's GDP per capita is $6,200 and China's is $14,000. The AHC is to give India a GDP per capita of at least $14,000 (in OTL purchasing power parity) by 2016 with as late a POD as possible.

  13. Maritime mercantile civilizations

    I'm asking this in part for an ASB conworld, but it's meant to be firmly grounded in OTL's history of maritime civilizations: the Phoenicians, the late medieval Europeans, Swahili Coast, the Malays. What I'm interested in is why there wasn't much exploration coming out of the Swahilis and...

  14. No Partition of India

    Is it plausible, with a post-1900 POD, to have India gain independence roughly on schedule without partition to a majority-Hindu and a majority-Muslim state?

  15. Alternate Great Vowel Shift

    Certain aspects of English phonology bother me from a purely aesthetic perspective, and I'm wondering whether they could have been butterflied away with a 16c POD. Namely, the Great Vowel Shift wasn't completely symmetric. In the front vowels, the Middle English vowels shifted /aɪ ɛː eː iː/ >...

  16. Experiment: which European country do you consider the most wanked in OTL?

    I'm asking about the modern era, especially the last few decades. I'm including all options I think people might pick, but if I didn't include yours, write a reply and yell at me for it.

  17. WI: carbodies and engines were separate

    There's an interesting article in Jalopnik about how cars would look if instead of the integrated bodies that they are, they had been manufactured separately as engines and carbodies, in analogy with the separation between the horse and the buggy.

  18. WI Lincoln keeps Hamlin on the ticket

    I saw this on Twitter. Is Yglesias right that Hamlin would've enforced Reconstruction more than Johnson?

  19. Kings of Israel

    No real history, just a list of kings of a Jewish Israel starting in the late 7c, in a TL with no Islam and rapid Byzantine and Persian decline on OTL's schedule. Names are Anglicized where there's a well-known English equivalent. List may be filled in later with specifics. Isaac I 658-707, r...

  20. Forestalling the Industrial Revolution

    What would have been the latest reasonable POD that would prevent mass industrialization? Something I've tried to come up with involves the English Civil War going a little differently, leading to Protestant absolutism in the second half of the 17c. The new regime closes down the Royal Society...
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