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Alt History ideas, rec and general discussion thread

I had a dream last night that I was in a small town in rural California checking out their museum, and it turned out that when it was founded by a group of bandits during the gold rush their leader declared it to be "the Free Republic of X" (I forget the town's name) and proclaimed himself Magistrate of X (basically mayor) and made the position hereditary. The town eventually adopted a normal municipal government when the Feds came calling, but they kept "the Free Republic of X" as their official name and for whatever reason the State of California just ignored this random little sub-national monarchy and the town kept the Magistrate-ocracy as essentially a powerless constitutional monarch for tourism reasons.

When I finished touring the museum they took us over to this big old Spanish colonial ranch house and introduced us to this nice old lady who was the current Magistrate of X and direct descendant of the original bandit leader. Then they took us back to the museum gift shop and I found a book by Harry Turtledove about the Free Republic of X taking over a bunch of California in the 19th century and having a treaty port in China that they were selling.
 
Idle thought: How would history develop if, in 500 BCE, the Americas magically get cattle and horses? And then, in 500 CE, the rest of the world gets maize and potato?
 
Well greater potential for transmission of disease from animals to humans makes it likely that the Americas will have its own suite of epidemic disease to introduce to the Old World when the time comes.
 
EBR said:
Well greater potential for transmission of disease from animals to humans makes it likely that the Americas will have its own suite of epidemic disease to introduce to the Old World when the time comes.
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Imagine how devastating that would be. Even with the expanded population from Potatoes and Maize, people would die in droves in both worlds if/when contact is made. I think that the New World would still get the worst of it, just because Old World diseases have had more time to gestate and develop, but there's no doubt Afro-Eurasia would have at least another Black Plague level event.
 
CastIron said:
Imagine how devastating that would be. Even with the expanded population from Potatoes and Maize, people would die in droves in both worlds if/when contact is made. I think that the New World would still get the worst of it, just because Old World diseases have had more time to gestate and develop, but there's no doubt Afro-Eurasia would have at least another Black Plague level event.
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The shock to the world would be tremendous- a period of universal pandemics. Agreed that it would be worse for the New World than the old, if simply because the New World faced brutal conquest at the same time as the Columbian Exchange plagues, but that might actually be reduced depending on how lethal the New World disease package is to Europeans.
 
Well, if both continents are reeling from disease that actually means they'll have breathing room to recover while the other one does so as well.
 
I suspect the main thing that would likely result is a new form of measles unknown to the old world though given from what I gathered humans had domesticated cattle for nearly 8,000 years before measles emerged from rinderpest in the ADs it might take a while for new diseases to appear and I supect it wouldn't result in lets say a new world version of smallpox given that apparently most likely came from a disease that effects rodents in Africa.
 
That is the common theory as It was present in the new world before Columbus arrived and there was no reports of it in the old world until after Columbus's voyage with a side note that apparently a number of people who served on Columbus's crew also ended up serving in the military campaign in Italy where Syphilis gets its first mention in European history.
 
Alane1 said:
I suspect the main thing that would likely result is a new form of measles unknown to the old world though given from what I gathered humans had domesticated cattle for nearly 8,000 years before measles emerged from rinderpest in the ADs it might take a while for new diseases to appear and I supect it wouldn't result in lets say a new world version of smallpox given that apparently most likely came from a disease that effects rodents in Africa.
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Guess the 'mere' 1,000 years were not enough.

Still, how would the new livestock affect the development of American societies? Places like Yucatan or Andes or Amazon wouldn't benefit too much, but I can see horse nomadic cultures rising out in the Great Plains and Pampas, and the Eastern US and the rest of Mexico would certainly benefit from it.

And how would the population growth from maize and potato affect the rest of the world?
 
Terra Novan said:
Guess the 'mere' 1,000 years were not enough.

Still, how would the new livestock affect the development of American societies? Places like Yucatan or Andes or Amazon wouldn't benefit too much, but I can see horse nomadic cultures rising out in the Great Plains and Pampas, and the Eastern US and the rest of Mexico would certainly benefit from it.
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Well in the case of the Andes Cattle will be huge, for example a big limiting factor for population over here is (as theories go since it's hard to really know for sure) how cold a bunch of parts of the Andes can get and how wet certain parts will be for like half the year, so sheep getting here will be of immense help to those nations, also horses would be of some use even in the Andes over here they are used surprisingly effectively for trade so they would definitely be of a lot of help, on the coast and the cultures over there they will be of a shit ton of help and I imagine a lot of indigenous cultures would explode in size and population.

Also most definitely horse nomadic cultures would arise as they did OTL when the Spanish came, especially in places like the Mississippi river and its tributaries, the same would be the case for the Pampas the Llanos regions in both modern Venezuela and Colombia and of course in The Great Planes.
 
Terra Novan said:
Idle thought: How would history develop if, in 500 BCE, the Americas magically get cattle and horses? And then, in 500 CE, the rest of the world gets maize and potato?
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Afro-Eurasia getting maize and potatoes so much earlier would be a game changer, just as it was OTL a thousand years later. Everywhere they are introduced would have a far more diverse diet that's less susceptible to weather, pestilence or warfare, and all the benefits that come with that. They'd probably have a much larger population much earlier, especially in less hospitable climates.

Though there's the question of whether a variety of cultivars and knowledge of how to most effectively grow and process them comes with, or those benefits come with the double-edged sword of rampant malnutrition and disastrous blights, just as happened OTL once again.
 
Vannifar said:
Though there's the question of whether a variety of cultivars and knowledge of how to most effectively grow and process them comes with, or those benefits come with the double-edged sword of rampant malnutrition and disastrous blights, just as happened OTL once again.
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Let's say they don't, as I was inspired by Ezcalli TL of GURPS, where earlier Columbian exchange actually led to massive Euro-screw.
 
Was there ever any attempt to create a timeline in which not only Tupac Shakur survives the attempt on his life (or maybe even completely avoiding it), but also becomes successful in his attempts to unite the Bloods and Crips into one single gang?
 
meloa789 said:
Was there ever any attempt to create a timeline in which not only Tupac Shakur survives the attempt on his life (or maybe even completely avoiding it), but also becomes successful in his attempts to unite the Bloods and Crips into one single gang?
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Pop Culture timelines about rap are rare, If your talking something like Thug Life as an attempt to unite the Bloods and Crips, then it would be less like a single gang and more The Commission. Because both gangs are more a broad nationwide association than say either a local street gang, or organized crime ala the Mafia were even groups outside of the five families answer to them even if they are technically their own thing, like the Philly and Jersey mob.
 
Lord Ultimus said:
With a POD after Sputnik, what's the earliest we could get a base on Mars?
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Probably by the mid- to late-1980s, at the earliest. Have JFK's advisors recommend a Skylab variant instead of cutting out the middleman and going right for the moon? A more slow-and-steady pace build up instead. Or maybe even have LBJ get elected in 1960, I remember reading somewhere he was the only President who was genuinely enthusiastic about space and NASA.
 
Vannifar said:
I'd never heard of Ezcalli before this, it sounds like an interesting scenario to develop a more robust alt-history from!
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To summarize, the Carthaginians discovers the Americas in 508 BCE, leading to the earlier Columbian exchange. The imported American crops, particularly the potatoes, cause severe disruption in Europe, however:

Potatoes and the Old World

Europeans depended on wheat (and, to a lesser extent, barley and rye) as their primary dietary staple from the third millennium B.C. to the 18th century. Wheat is not easy to grow in northern Europe, which is why in Roman times the population density centered much farther south than it is in modern times. It is also hard to feed a family on wheat grown on a small farm. Small farmers depended on large-scale agriculture (in Roman times, Egyptian wheat plantations) which in turn led to centralized economy and government.
With the coming of the potato, a small farmer can easily feed his family on the harvest of a small plot. In Homeline, the change to the potato in the 18th century had little political effect because authority was already effectively centralized. However, in Ezcalli, the less-stable Roman political economy fragmented as the provincials depended less and less on Roman wheat for their seed grain and their survival.
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The present-day (1848) is an industrializing world dominated by the Aztecs, Songhay, and the Iroquois. Most of Europe is fragmented into various iron age/medieval level statelets, the rest of Eurasia is under the gigantic Mongol Khaganates that span from Poland to Japan, but they are lagging behind and is about to have their Opium Wars equivalent with the Aztecs.
 
I don't buy that scenario about potatoes making so much of a difference. Not because they're useless (far from it), but a lack of potatoes wasn't why northern Europe was relatively underpopulated, and "wheat won't grow in northern Europe" is not actually a reasonable explanation. The population of northern Europe grew considerably during Roman times, which is precisely why Germania was such a source of peoples migrating into Roman territory. The heavy plow certainly helped expand the population, but there were other factors, and it wasn't potatoes. Wheat also is capable of supporting a population on a smallish farm, as is rye, barley or oats.

The introduction of the potato would make a considerable amount of difference, but that's for other reasons. (Even higher calorie yield, easier to hide from passing armies, etc.)
 
Jared said:
I don't buy that scenario about potatoes making so much of a difference. Not because they're useless (far from it), but a lack of potatoes wasn't why northern Europe was relatively underpopulated, and "wheat won't grow in northern Europe" is not actually a reasonable explanation. The population of northern Europe grew considerably during Roman times, which is precisely why Germania was such a source of peoples migrating into Roman territory. The heavy plow certainly helped expand the population, but there were other factors, and it wasn't potatoes. Wheat also is capable of supporting a population on a smallish farm, as is rye, barley or oats.

The introduction of the potato would make a considerable amount of difference, but that's for other reasons. (Even higher calorie yield, easier to hide from passing armies, etc.)
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Yeah, the potato argument basically ignores all of history and tries to extrapolate an explanation for all of human civilization on the facts that (1) Rome was dependent on grain imports and (2) Potatoes allow for more food to be obtained from a smaller area than grain.

Like, how do Medieval Europe or the Inca Empire make sense in a scenario where grain agriculture is entirely dependent on a centralized state, while potatoes promote decentralization?
 
Lord Ultimus said:
With a POD after Sputnik, what's the earliest we could get a base on Mars?
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Like @Joshua Ben Ari says, mid to late 80s.

I have no idea what kind of PoD could get the US or the USSR to Mars that soon though. While it is possible to develop all the hardware, build all the infrastructure and complete all the research needed to get a safe base on Mars with reasonably secure logistics by that time, it would take at least an order of magnitude more money to achieve (so a couple trillion dollars in inflation-adjusted money). So we are talking a pretty hefty expansion of space program spending. Considering the difficult economic circumstances of both the US and USSR during the 70s, it is hard to imagine what would make such heavy spending politically palatable.

With a smaller PoD, like say no Vietnam war means that NASA doesn't get cut to the bone in the 1970s (though it still gets cut quite dramatically from the post-Apollo high), maybe the base being founded in the late 2000s or early 2010s.

fasquardon
 
So I found this video which is very informative about historiography by a channel that is pretty great in general and has a lot of good content.

The video in question:
 
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