Miscellaneous <1900 (Alternate) History Thread
- Thread starter RMcD94
- Start date
Bytor
Monthly Donor
To prevent the union of Scotland and England, is there a better way than just stopping James VI of Scotland from becoming James I of England? Like, would it be more effective to go back further so that an alternate Scottish monarch is not so closely related as to be in a position to bring about personal union?
mickeymouse
Donor
If James V dies childless the next Scottish monarch won’t be related to the Tudors.
Got inspired by this song here. Came across it a few months back and was thinking about it with Easter come and gone.
So during the Great Awakening of the 1790s to the 1840s, a few Eastern Orthodox priests/monks somehow found themselves in the back country of the Appalachians and somehow lit an absolute firestorm of conversions all up and down the hills and hollers. The Ethnicity of the region doesn't change too much from the Scots-Irish of OTL, but by the time of the American Civil War, all of the core of Appalachia from Georgia to Virginia is Eastern Orthodox and ended up becoming an Autocephalous Orthodox Church in its own right.
What does that look like for American Culture and history and what does it do for Appalachia?
Imagine if Coal Mining becomes a thing in this TL if Mining interests start screwing over locals OR actually try to chase a monastery off their outcrop things could get REAL ugly REAL quick.
So during the Great Awakening of the 1790s to the 1840s, a few Eastern Orthodox priests/monks somehow found themselves in the back country of the Appalachians and somehow lit an absolute firestorm of conversions all up and down the hills and hollers. The Ethnicity of the region doesn't change too much from the Scots-Irish of OTL, but by the time of the American Civil War, all of the core of Appalachia from Georgia to Virginia is Eastern Orthodox and ended up becoming an Autocephalous Orthodox Church in its own right.
What does that look like for American Culture and history and what does it do for Appalachia?
Imagine if Coal Mining becomes a thing in this TL if Mining interests start screwing over locals OR actually try to chase a monastery off their outcrop things could get REAL ugly REAL quick.
If the British Empire had somehow been able to hang onto a decent-sized chunk of the Thirteen Colonies, sufficient to maintain an ‘American Establishment’ as a separate armed power in it’s own right (Somewhat like the contemporary Irish Establishment) how many regiments would it have been able to maintain in the long term?
Also, what is the latest point at which one can reasonably use the size of the contemporary US Army as a rough guide to the size of this ‘American Establishment’?
Also, what is the latest point at which one can reasonably use the size of the contemporary US Army as a rough guide to the size of this ‘American Establishment’?
Might be my inner building nerd speaking, but I would kill to see an Appalachian-Orthodox take on architecture. Can't stop thinking about it now.
I think regions of Virginia in the Appalachian mountain range (what we know today as West Virginia) would become even more distinct culturally from the urban regions to the east and closer to the coast. You said the ethnicity wouldn't change too much, but I could see migrants, artists, and intellectuals fleeing Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries being drawn to the familiar presence of Eastern Orthodox churches in Appalachia. The mountains could become more of a melting pot and have a higher population of yeoman farmers.
I'm interested in how Orthodoxy would react to the chattel slavery seen in the American South. Assuming you're with me on the migration point I made, I think the population in Appalachia would be increasingly against the trade. In our timeline, farmers in the region couldn't afford and didn't approve of the practice. A larger, more diverse people in the mountain range would have a considerable impact on the boundaries drawn between the North and the South leading up to the Civil War.
Assuming the American Civil War still occurs, I wouldn't be surprised if West Virginia's break from Virginia itself had already happened by that point instead of after the war had started.
THE KINGFISH
Gone Fishin'
How would the Belgian Revolution not happening affect the Revolutions of 1848?
This probably depends on how or why the Belgian revolution does not occur.
If Khan Krum lived longer, do you think he would have accomplished something with his siege of Constantinople? Obviously he knew he couldn’t realistically take the city, but I think his goal was more so to scare the populous and try to de legitimize Leo the Armenian. If he had carried out his siege, could he have arranged for Leo to be overthrown?
What is the plausibility that the (proto-)Muskogean-speaking clans would settle Cuba (optional: southern Florida and Bahamas)?
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Very low without a Mississippian seafaring wank. There seems to be surprising obstacles between Cuba and southern Florida, hence the very different flora and fauna found there. This extended to human cultures, since cultures in southern Florida rarely contacted those in Cuba and are archaeologically distinct from a very early time period and in later time periods even moreso. For instance, the Taino of Cuba were (mostly) cassava farmers, while the Indians of southern Florida were sedentary hunter-gatherers who gathered vast quantities of shellfish. There was not much contact between the two groups, probably because Florida didn't have much to offer that the Taino couldn't get elsewhere that didn't require a journey across so much hurricane-prone open water.
In any case, the Muskogean peoples originated somewhere inland west of the Mississippi River. It seems clear by the number of language isolates/small language families around the Gulf Coast (like all Florida native languages beside ones that arrived later like the Mississippian era Appalachee or colonial era Seminole) or inland (the Yuchi, probably spoken over a far greater area) that Muskogean peoples are a relatively recent arrival. It's been a while since I checked the literature, but it is very much linked to the spread of Mississippian culture and large migration events that occurred around the time Cahokia was abandoned (a major drought in the 13th century) and the historically attested mass migrations and violence of the 16th/17th centuries (drought and onset of the colonial era). So that's another huge hurdle for that.
I was really curious about that specific area(s) west of the Mississippi.
@isabella
Is it possible for John of England to marry Blanche of Navarre and for Theobald of Champagne to marry Isabella of Angouleme and is a survival of Henry II of Jerusalem and Champagne necessary for this swap of matches to happen?
Is it possible for John of England to marry Blanche of Navarre and for Theobald of Champagne to marry Isabella of Angouleme and is a survival of Henry II of Jerusalem and Champagne necessary for this swap of matches to happen?
It's been a while since I checked the literature on it but it was probably somewhere in the Ozarks in southern Missouri or Arkansas, or maybe a little further west on the eastern edge of the Great Plains (which would be ironic given the US government deported the majority of their distant descendants there). Likely it was not far from the later site of Cahokia, but wasn't too far west either since Muskogean languages have elements in common with other indigenous languages of the Southeast (there exists a coherent Southeastern language area/sprachbund) and to a much lesser/theoretical degree, the Gulf Coast as far south as Veracruz in Mexico. The latter is probably related to how maize cultivation arrived in the region.
If the US constitution doesn’t have a quorum of states ratifying it by 1789 and Thomas Jefferson is still in France for a longer period of time, how could that impact the French Revolution further given that he was friends with Marquis de Lafayette and that Jefferson also consulted Lafayette while the latter drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen?