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  1. Fanny Kaplan kills Lenin, 1918

    So what happens if Lenin is suddenly erased from history in August of 1918? If we (or rather Phillip K. Dick) can spin a successful assassination by Giuseppe Zangara into a nightmare Nazi-world, what can we do with a dead Lenin? What if Stalin becomes leader that early?

  2. Dr. King dies in 1960; Malcolm X becomes civil rights leader

    Okay, so Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy, and five other early civil rights worthies die during a bus crash in 1960. Although it takes a few years for him to build his base to Dr. King's level, by 1964 Malcolm X is the civil rights leader in the United States. Note that this is Malcolm before his...

  3. Pacific Disaster: Little Boy detonates on Tinian Island

    What would happen if Little Boy exploded on the Northern Marianas Island air base on the evening before it was to be loaded onto the Enola Gay? Louis Alvarez thought this was possible, although a long shot. If the uranium rings all slammed together at once, fission would begin; this might...

  4. The new Canaanites: a history of the Dutch-nation-in-exile

    I had the idea of the forces of Spain finally solving their problem with the troublesome northern provinces by simply shipping off the rebellious Protestants and then trying to establish full hegemony over the Netherlands and Frisia via Catholic settlement. My first idea was to have the...

  5. How to advance pre-Columbian America?

    I've also always been curious as to why chemical weapons haven't played a bigger role in world history (meaning, when we're discussing pre-gunpowder societies, basically poisoned arrows or spears). I guess one of the reasons is that most biological poisons take far too long to kill, which...

  6. How to advance pre-Columbian America?

    I guess I was assuming the development of iron-working would be somewhere further back in the past, allowing metal-workers to dominate their still-Stone Age neighbors. I was drawing paralells with what happened in Bantu/Yoruba society, wherein ironsmiths became a secret society assumed to have...

  7. Frederick Barbarossa doesn't drown in that stream...!

    It didn't in OTL, even in the face of the Crusades; then again Egypt generally wasn't their target. The unity between the Muslim east (Syria and Babylon) and the Muslim west (Egypt) did fall apart after Saladin's death, although it wasn't particularly traumatic. The guy who ruled Egypt...

  8. Frederick Barbarossa doesn't drown in that stream...!

    Okay, so what if Freddy Barbarossa actually made it across that Anatolian stream? What if he manages not cling to life for (let's say) another three years? And what if the man who unified the middle east--Saladin--dies instead, of natural causes? I'm used to thinking of Saladin as being...

  9. How to advance pre-Columbian America?

    Were the Americas really so "backward" in the 15th century? The Incan Empire was a marvel of political centralization. I have trouble thinking of the Incas as being so much "less advanced" than the Europeans as being "technologically different." One thing that might have put the Incas on...

  10. Dracula, the Scourge of God defeats the Ottomans

    The thing about Vlad, as I understand him, was that he was motivated primarily by revenge, sadism, but above all, self-preservation. I don't think he was the kind of guy who'd care if the Turks ruled over the Balkans, as long as they left him alone. But alas, they didn't, and Vlad fought as...

  11. Dracula, the Scourge of God defeats the Ottomans

    Vlad isn't going to be especially popular with the Greeks--or really anyone outside of Wallachia or various Western European powers with anti-Turkish agendas of their own. He's the kind of guy who could cause the enmity between Greek/Latin Christians to be truly pronounced. If the Greeks...

  12. Dracula, the Scourge of God defeats the Ottomans

    No kidding. I can absolutely see Vlad behaving very badly with this. I can also see Vlad still haunting the imaginations of both Turks and Europeans centuries down the line, which is kind of where I was going with this. Simple rule of thumb: if you've got a guy who gets his kicks impaling...

  13. Dracula, the Scourge of God defeats the Ottomans

    Well, I'm the OP, so I guess I'll try to answer... (remember, I'm an ecologist, not a military historian...) Vlad attempted a blitzkrieg-style surprise assault on Constantinople. I imagined, based on Vlad's personality, that he might actually consider pressing his advantage like this when...

  14. Dracula, the Scourge of God defeats the Ottomans

    Excellent points, all. I myself was bothered by the idea of a successful Anatolian invasion, but sort of needed the idea for a "Vladwank." If I'm going to win against say, Mike Tyson, I might want to put a bullet in him before we go mano-a-mano. The scorched earth in Anatolia would be the...

  15. Dracula, the Scourge of God defeats the Ottomans

    The Great Plague of 1464 (inspired by the Plague of Justinian, many centuries earlier...) At the beginning of the year 1464, the fortunes of the Ottomans began to wax once again. One by one, Vlad's garrisons west of the Sakarya River began to fall to Turkish forces. Worst of all, plague...

  16. Dracula, the Scourge of God defeats the Ottomans

    Vlad's "conquered territories" ("devastated" would be a better adjective) look something like this: Vlad being red, Ottomans green. After his activities in Anatolia (which probably took a year or so) he heads back to clean up the mess in Bulgaria, and later Wallachia itself. He had a fair...

  17. Dracula, the Scourge of God defeats the Ottomans

    Europe--perhaps Eurasia in general--maybe dodged a major bullet in 1462, when Sultan Mehmet II himself invaded Wallachia to deal with an uppity local named Vlad Tepes. Technically Mehmet's invasion was a failure, since he really did little other than burn a couple of cities and failed to get...

  18. Mongols defeated in Russia

    The Mongols named Kozelsk (located about 140 miles SW of Moscow) "the City of Woe" because of the difficulty they had conquering it relative to the other Russian cities. The Kozelski even managed to defeat a Mongol vanguard army, something that had been rarely done up until that time. In the...

  19. Consequences of no Native Americans

    Yes, but some of the worst, like yellow fever, would not exist in the Americas. Yellow fever was an import from Africa. I don't know if malaria was present in the New World or not...I'll need to look that up... I wonder if the presence of mammoths could start some sort of trans-Atlantic...

  20. Consequences of no Native Americans

    Hmm...as an ecologist by trade, I'm gonna say "yes." Even assuming the worst-case scenario, the megafauna in Mexico, Central America, and probably the American southwest and California are going to survive the comet and associated firestorms. Virtually all of the megafauna found in the...
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