Recent content by bguy

One of the key aspects of the Augustan political system was Augustus letting the Senate feel like they still mattered. This meant not just consulting with senators and letting them manage certain civil administration tasks like the grain supply and the aqueducts, but also assigning senators to...

Germanicus is certainly a much more engaging and likeable character than dour old Tiberius. That said I'm not entirely certain that Germanicus would prove to be a better emperor. In particular he seemed to be bold almost to the point of recklessness (which nearly led to disaster during his...

#2 is actually really bad for Augustus. After Agrippa died Tiberius was Augustus' main military commander, and after his return from exile he cleaned up some really difficult situations for Augustus. (The Great Illyrian Revolt and the aftermath of the Varian Disaster.) Admittedly, you've...

That was how almost all Roman conquests played out though. The Romans sent very large armies against the Carthaginians in the Third Punic War and against the Numidians in the Jugurthine War (and against the Numidians again in Caesar's civil war which saw Rome actually annex Numidia), but...

The wall really wasn't good enough though. That's why Rome had to keep 3 legions stationed in Britain until the 5th century. And the potential benefit for conquering the whole island would be that if all of Britain is pacified then the Romans can permanently reduce the size of the garrison...

What would happen if smallpox, influenza, and measles are all introduced to North America much earlier than IOTL? (Maybe with the outbreak happening when Norse colonies are established in North America in the 11th century.) While such an outbreak would be catastrophic at any time, if it...

There's something to that, but it's not as though the Romans had no ability to expand the size of their army either. Rome had 25 legions at the death of Augustus, Caligula raised that total to 27, the number was increased to 29 by Nero and the various contenders in the Year of the Four...

Would a lack of support from British regulars without more really be enough to discourage colonialization though? The initial British colonies in what would later become the United States were settled and indeed fought significant wars with the native population (such as King Philip's War)...

I don't think killing Andrew Jackson would actually help much. Jackson himself believed that the Indian Removal Act was necessary to prevent the Cherokee from being massacred in Georgia. "Jackson might claim his policy was liberal, but that claim didn't make it so. He held out the...

Would taking the remainder of Caledonia enable them to eventually station fewer troops in the British Isles? The Romans were able to substantially reduce the number of legions they kept stationed in Spain after Augustus completed the conquest of the region (eventually getting their garrison in...

That's a fair point but by the same token the Carthaginians would also have shorter and more secure supply lines in Spain than they did in Italy. Hannibal should be able to pretty much hold off the Romans in Spain indefinitely and certainly won't suffer a Dertosa style defeat, which would free...

I do wonder how much the lack of support from the Carthaginian government to Hannibal really hurt the Carthaginian war effort. While it's true Carthage didn't send much in the way of reinforcements to Hannibal, they did send several large armies to Spain and also launched campaigns against the...

In The Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson says that the slave states quadrupled their railroad mileage in the 1850s, so there definitely was significant interest in building railroads in the south at that time. McPherson also says that by the end of the 1850s the southern states had 16...

Surely though the reason IOTL that it was relatively rare to see troops from the Army of the Potomac sent west was because the Army of Northern Virginia was still intact and Richmond was still in Confederate hands until the very end of the war and thus those Union troops were still needed in the...

Correct. Stephen Sears suggests in his book, "Lincoln's Lieutenants: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac" that McClellan could have won a smashing defensive victory at Gaines's Mill that would have left Richmond in his grasp, if he had just refrained from countermanding his own order...