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Alternate History General Discussion

Does anyone remember an alternate history novel where Romans displaced from Rome into Eboracum by Brennus return generations later to the Italian peninsula?

EDIT: I may have misremembered the details as I am now mostly sure I was describing Hannibal's Children by John Maddox Roberts, where Carthage forces the Romans to resettle in the North after losing the Second Punic War.
 
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Random AH query - are there any sources for planned Autobahn construction in the Third Reich's conquered territories? I know we have a rough idea for the super-size Breitspurbahn routes in the East, but what about highways?
 
lerk said:
A pretty interesting alternate history to write would be one in which the two mainstream poles of Western politics would be 1) religious Christians who believe in converting all of mankind and equality between classes etc. and 2) secular liberals who are diehard believers in Darwin, “survival of the fittest”, support eugenics, oppression of what they think are “inferior races” etc. Don’t know how I would write such a story nor do I know enough about Western political history to really do anything but that’s an idea. “Secular nationalists vs religious internationalists” was/is an actual distinction that exists, mainly in Muslim countries, fwiw so imagining a western version of it shouldn’t be too difficult.
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I suppose you could say that the American Civil War had shades of this as well - the abolitionist movement was very religious, that men like John Brown, William Garrison, John Rankin, and Elijah Lovejoy were its most ardent supporters shouldn’t be surprising. Conversely I have read that Southern universities was a hub of secularist thought in the US with regards to biology and the like, and that many Southerners outright denied things like a common ancestry for all races. Whatever religiosity that the South had was a result of its own traditions, whereas many Christians in the North viewed the war as a religious crusade. But then begs the question of how much of Northern religiosity comes from its Puritan heritage? It’s interesting to think about. That the South had numerous Jews in their ranks, with Judah P. Benjamin being its Secretary of State, whereas Union Generals Grant and Butler were pretty anti-Semitic in their war time behavior is another interesting contrast (Butler going so far to say that the Jews are betraying America as they betrayed Jesus).
 
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I am finally getting around to reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union and I am impressed at how well Chabon nails an As You Know Bob segment. I think it helps because, telling the story of a displaced people, the historical is personal and vice versa, but he also manages to present a world and a scenario that feel lived in- it isn't like internet AH where it feels like an idea that was chosen just for being cool and has an almost strategy game style viewpoint about it, you really get the feeling that he considered what it would be like to be a European Jew landing on the Sitka Peninsula.
 
lerk said:
I suppose you could say that the American Civil War had shades of this as well - the abolitionist movement was very religious, that men like John Brown, William Garrison, John Rankin, and Elijah Lovejoy were its most ardent supporters shouldn’t be surprising. Conversely I have read that Southern universities was a hub of secularist thought in the US with regards to biology and the like, and that many Southerners outright denied things like a common ancestry for all races. Whatever religiosity that the South had was a result of its own traditions, whereas many Christians in the North viewed the war as a religious crusade. But then begs the question of how much of Northern religiosity comes from its Puritan heritage? It’s interesting to think about. That the South had numerous Jews in their ranks, with Judah P. Benjamin being its Secretary of State, whereas Union Generals Grant and Butler were pretty anti-Semitic in their war time behavior is another interesting contrast (Butler going so far to say that the Jews are betraying America as they betrayed Jesus).
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This has a place (especially in contemporary rhetoric-Democrats often called Republicans "religious fanatics" and said that was their motive for abolitionism-though ofc even by the 1860s the Democrats were the Catholic party). However, I think you might be understating the very real nature of southern Christianity. After all, American Protestant denominations (Presbyterians, Baptists, etc) didn't just fall away in the South, the Southern people in them schismed off to form new ones.
Your point about the relative prominence of Jews in the Confederacy is sound enough (I can't name any besides Benjamin in really important positions, but still that's one more than in the highest echelons of power in Washington).
I have my own opinions on Grant and Butler in this context, honestly. As far as I see it, Grant's General Order 11 arose out of quite a bit of latent prejudice on his part, combined with a few annoying incidents that a man in his right judgement wouldn't have overreacted to, percolating in a mind undergoing massive stress. As soon as he got pushback or even seemingly had the chance to analyze his own actions once his temper cooled, he dropped the matter like a stone and was never notably hostile to Jews again in his public life.
As for Butler, he was a demagogue par excellence who could always use something to rile people up against-I think he was fundamentally incapable of not taking the "cheap shot" as it were, by pandering to antisemitism. I don't think he invested much emotional effort into it in any case.
Overall, Jews had a place on (and prayed for) both sides.
 
lerk said:
I suppose you could say that the American Civil War had shades of this as well - the abolitionist movement was very religious, that men like John Brown, William Garrison, John Rankin, and Elijah Lovejoy were its most ardent supporters shouldn’t be surprising. Conversely I have read that Southern universities was a hub of secularist thought in the US with regards to biology and the like, and that many Southerners outright denied things like a common ancestry for all races. Whatever religiosity that the South had was a result of its own traditions, whereas many Christians in the North viewed the war as a religious crusade. But then begs the question of how much of Northern religiosity comes from its Puritan heritage? It’s interesting to think about. That the South had numerous Jews in their ranks, with Judah P. Benjamin being its Secretary of State, whereas Union Generals Grant and Butler were pretty anti-Semitic in their war time behavior is another interesting contrast (Butler going so far to say that the Jews are betraying America as they betrayed Jesus).
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The Southern colonies originally were less religious than than the New England and Mid Atlantic colonies. They were initially Anglican but in the 18th century were flooded by Prebysterian Scottish and Scots-Irish settlers who with the Great Awakening mostly became Baptists.
Read and .
Judah Benjamim and other Confederate Jews suffered a lot of anti-Semitism during the war, read https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...surviving-confederacy-be.466303/post-18844798.
 
Sports AH things to consider (thinking of making a blog post here and/or on Fuldapocalypse too):

Different sports have varying levels of how a team affects an individual player (apart from not directly measurable things like development and morale). On one end, a baseball non-pitcher is basically an island unto himself when it comes to hitting. As Mike Trout has shown, it's possible to be a great player on a terrible team. The only real team affected stats are RBIs, something now known as being totally context dependent. Pitchers are slightly more influenced, both in terms of the (also context-dependent) wins losses if they have good/bad hitting and maybe a little if they have good fielders behind them, but baseball is still a "one part can't affect the whole that much" sport.

On the other, American football is very much a team-reliant endeavor. My favorite example is Steve Young, a hall of fame quarterback who excelled with his feet as much as his arm-but who is near-unanimously considered to have achieved nowhere near his OTL potential if he'd stayed on the lousy 1980s Tampa Bay Buccaneers instead of getting traded to Joe Montana's 49ers and learning as a backup.
 
Coiler said:
Wondering where a good enough place to put the hypothetical "African Singapore" (country that can achieve massive non-resource based economic growth and increase in living standards) that @Gary Oswald talked about in his "Africa Without The Scramble" post would be.
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The OTL ‘African Singapore’ is commonly said to be Rwanda.
 
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Coiler said:
Wondering where a good enough place to put the hypothetical "African Singapore" (country that can achieve massive non-resource based economic growth and increase in living standards) that @Gary Oswald talked about in his "Africa Without The Scramble" post would be.
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It's a bit cliche, but Zanzibar has some potential along those lines. (Though with spices, it's going to be partly resource-based growth for a while, perhaps with diversification later).
 
Coiler said:
Wondering where a good enough place to put the hypothetical "African Singapore" (country that can achieve massive non-resource based economic growth and increase in living standards) that @Gary Oswald talked about in his "Africa Without The Scramble" post would be.
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Djibouti or Aden? Good harbours, on a major shipping route...
 
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