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Hey all - I'm trying to reduce my overall footprint on the internet and I'm interested in deleting or blanking quite a lot of my older posts, particularly stuff in The Pub that has unnecessary personal detail in it. It seems like I can only delete and edit posts in open threads, not in locked...

My Bend in the River research has led me on lots of interesting side quests, and I thought this one was of general interest and AH potential enough to start a thread. In 1966, Soviet fishing fleets began cruising very close to America's Pacific coast, not only within today's EEZ lines but in...

I came across this piece of historical nonsense yesterday. It's kind of a Frivolous ASB question here, but I can't help but wonder - what weapons would the presidents choose, and who would win? I imagine if it involved hand-to-hand combat, W - ten years younger and known to at least pretend to...

This is a trope we see occasionally, but I feel like there's a lot of unmined potential in it. There are quite a few prominent people who either could have a) been raised in different countries than OTL had their families' circumstances been different ("AH Twins" may come into play here), or b)...

In the 1970s, civil rights leader Floyd McKissick undertook one of the era's many fascinating failed experiments: he tried to build a city from scratch in rural Warren County, North Carolina, with a goal of Black uplift through entrepreneurial New Urbanism. The project was called Soul City. As...

The Mining Act of 1872 established American citizens' right to stake mineral claims on the public domain - something that had previously been ambiguous-to-illegal on the federal level despite a few decades' worth of gold rushes in the West. Recently I've come across suggestions in a few sources...

For those unfamiliar, the Hetch Hetchy Valley lies towards the northern end of Yosemite National Park. Formed by the Tuolumne River, which flows from the glaciers of the Sierra down into the Central Valley of California, it resembles nothing so much as a smaller version of the famous Yosemite...

Organized English spelling reform has been around since at least Noah Webster, but the closest it came to programmatic adoption, as far as I know, was in the Progressive Era USA. The Carnegie-funded Simplified Spelling Board was a typical project of the era's drive for efficiency, and it had the...

Apparently UnHerd is starting a counterfactual series. I am not expecting anything great from them, but their introductory article implicitly brings up an element of AH I've considered a few times. The author claims that counterfactuals are disdained by serious historians because they are "prone...

Yes, another thread about a political figure's death. I'm a lot of fun. On July 12, 1947, Senator John W. Bricker was shot at in the Capitol complex by a former Capitol Police officer named William Louis Kaiser. Kaiser was a fellow Ohioan and had petitioned Bricker for help after he lost money...

In 1974, the novelist and psychedelic evangelist Ken Kesey got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to run an event he called the Bend in the River Council. This was an experiment in state-level direct democracy: town meetings across Oregon would elect a slate of 100 or so...

Big Bill Haywood and two other leaders of the Western Federation of Miners were indicted for conspiracy in the 1905 assassination of Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg, but they were ultimately exonerated after a sensational trial that made the careers of defense attorney Clarence Darrow and...

I haven't been watching the show, but I have been rereading the books for the first time since I was a kid. They still hold up really well and will retake their position among my favorites - but naturally I've been paying more attention to the alternate history elements this time around...

I'll let Mazda's blog article introduce Henry George and his ideas for those who are unfamiliar. We think of George today (when we think of him at all) as an intellectual rather than a politician, but he did make a few bids for office in his own right. The most successful of those was his first...

I've mentioned a few times on here that I've been working (very slowly) on a project about an independent republic in the Oregon Country, founded in the 1840s in response to slower US expansion. While researching, I've come across a side topic that I won't be using but which is interesting in...

I recently came across Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain in the local anarchist bookstore, and I thought I'd recommend you all check it out if you haven't already. I've admitted before that most published alternate history doesn't interest me, but I really enjoyed this one. The POD is a...

A small and ghoulish POD here. In December 1976, Dianne Feinstein - then a San Francisco supervisor - was targeted by a bomb hidden in the flower planters outside her apartment. It misfired and was found later by a maid. The New World Liberation Front claimed responsibility in a communique...

Just finished Oregon governor Tom McCall's TOM McCALL: MAVERICK, a short and grandiosely titled memoir chock full of potential PODs. Apparently McCall considered running for mayor of Moscow, Idaho while working there as a cub reporter but was shot down by his boss; he also escaped a mysterious...

I'm not sure my personal output of maps is prodigious enough to warrant a whole dedicated thread, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. So here's a map playground for all!

Ayn Rand's Objectivist Katanga made for a fun AH story, but required some creative PODs to get the ball rolling - Rand never had direct ties to Congolese politics. However, I've been doing some reading and it seems as though the idea of American libertarians engaging in neocolonial adventurism...