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    AH Challenge: Preempt the rise of car-dependent urbanism

    One cannot underestimate the massive societal changes induced by the decision to embrace car-dependent urbanism in the middle decades of the 20th century. In a short time it fundamentally transformed cities throughout the world. That disruption was most pronounced in the US and Canada but...
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    WI: Jacques Delors becomes president of the French Republic in 1995

    In homage to Jacques Delors, who passed away today aged 98, I would like to explore a WI that I have long wondered about: back during the "second cohabitation" of the Balladur premiership, Delors, whose mandate as president of the European Commission had just ended, was widely expected to step...
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    AH Challenge: More "Air Afrique"

    Air Afrique is a now-defunct commercial airline whose key feature was its Pan-African identity. It was jointly founded in 1961 by 11 newly independent former French colonies, each of which realized that it did not have the capability to operate an international airline on its own, but that a...
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    Things you didn't know where anachronisms

    Consider the tumbleweed. Such a staple of the Western film genre that it has long since become a trope. Well, I only just learned that the plant is not native to the New World but is in fact an invasive species, that was accidentally introduced to the US by Russian immigrants in 1873: the flax...
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    AH challenge: other invasive species

    OTL is full of instances of humans deliberately or unwittingly introducing plant and animal species in ecosystems where they weren't originally present. Sometimes the results are ecologically catastrophic as said species, lacking natural predators, proliferate out of control. Sometimes they...
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    What if Brazil's "Cohen Plan" was thwarted in time?

    The "Cohen Plan" was a false flag operation by the Brazilian military in cooperation with President Getulio Vargas, which provided a pretext for the coup of November 1937 by alleging an imminent revolutionary uprising led by a cabal of Jewish Communists. Historians consider it the most blatant...
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    Esterno Notte: What if Aldo Moro hadn't been executed by the Red Brigades?

    Currently playing on Arte, Marco Bellocchio's mini-series Esterno Notte is about the abduction and eventual assassination of Italian PM Aldo Moro in 1978, as he was in the process of negotiating a grand compromise with the Communist Party. In the first and last episodes, the series veers into an...
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    AH challenge: More "Trinidadised" Caribbean and American countries

    Trinidad-and-Tobago is an interesting case of a former plantation economy whose largest ethnic group is descended from East Indian indentured labourers rather than African slaves. So by "Trinidadisation", I mean the importation of large numbers of East Indian workers as a cheap alternative to...
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    Discovery of the Americas delayed: does Spain take the Reconquista to North Africa?

    From my admittedly superficial knowledge of early modern Spanish history, it would seem that one reason Spain's conquest of the Americas was so violent was that its nobility was still in Reconquista mode after completing the expulsion of the Muslims and Jews from the Iberian peninsula, and...
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    Other designs for the White House

    From HouseFresh, here are 3D pictures of also-ran designs for the White House. Have you got a favourite? What the White House Could Have Looked Like
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    WI anti-drug crusader Harry Anslinger died early?

    Like the better-known J. Edgar Hoover, Harry J. Anslinger (there seems to be something cursed about that initial) was a long-serving US official who tirelessly injected his personal prejudices into law enforcement, with consequences that are arguably felt to this day. He headed the Federal...
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    WI: A new capital city for Mexico

    A number of developing countries have moved their capital, often building a new city from scratch for that purpose. The most famous example is Brazil, but one might also mention Ivory Coast, Myanmar and soon Indonesia. Now Mexico City suffers from a number of issues that could justify moving the...
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    AH Challenge: What border quirks can you think of?

    AH worldbuilders generally like their borders neat and tidy. But in real life borders sometimes have weird quirks to them, the result of unsatisfactory compromises, unresolved disputes, mere oversights, or even just the cartographers doing a half-assed job. The French-Spanish border famously has...
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    Self-insert ISOT novels as propaganda: the case of Russia's "Popadantsy" stories

    It appears that the AH subgenre of self-insert ISOTs has been popular in Russia since the turn of the 21st century. In recent years this type of fiction, locally known as popadantsy or "accidental travel", has become a vehicle for nationalistic propaganda: many such stories are thinly-veiled...
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    A thread for general musical WIs

    When alternate history enthusiasts think about musical WIs, most of the time it's about modern pop music--the Beatles not splitting (or never forming in the first place and an aspiring singer from another TL claiming their songs), Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens not taking that fateful plane...
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    Alternate history in the Tolkienverse: What if Gandalf or Galadriel had claimed the One Ring?

    Every reader of the books has wondered what might have happened if Gandalf or Galadriel had, against their better judgement, yielded to the temptation of claiming the One Ring for themselves. Nerd of the Rings examines each hypothesis in turn:
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    Unbuilt Canberra

    This YouTube video from the Kings and Things channel shows how the Australian capital would have looked, had the design by architect Ernest Gimson been selected. Very Ruritanian.
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    Fragments of the Past: counterfactual archeology

    Fragments of the Past is a worldbuilding project by Italian graphic artist Massimiliano Haematinon Nigro. It involves fictional Bronze Age civilizations loosely based on those of OTL's Eastern Mediterranean, on the lost continent of Askedoria; but the conceit is that this setting is examined...
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    Natural nuclear reactors and premodern civilizations

    This may pertain more to fictional world-building than to strict alternate history, but bear with me: There is such a thing as a natural nuclear reactor. One was discovered in Gabon in 1972 when uranium ore at the Oklo mine turned out to be inexplicably depleted: the right conditions had been...
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    AH challenge: A Muslim European country that considers itself Christian

    Recently, Chuck Häberl was mentioning on FB that the medieval Christian idea of Islam was so wildly inaccurate, many would probably have been unable to correctly identify the real thing if they came across it. For example, in the seminal Song of Roland: So according to one of the most famous...
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