History Forum / General / What If / October 2005

In April 16, 1800 a man is born to a noble family in the United
Kingdom. His name is George Bingham.
It is noticed during his life that he ages very gracefully (in fact he
doesn't appear older than 35). After the events of the Crimean War,

    POD 1985: A little girl dies. This is not of itself news-
worthy but in this case the little girl was an up and coming child
beauty queen and investigation reveals that she died during plastic
surgery. _That_ can be spun into public outrage and is but when

    Hypothetical [1]: Say that there's an issue that doesn't divide
a particular nation but could and is tied into basic religious identity.
Do PODs that make it an Issue fall under the BOP or not?
                            James Nicoll

UAE says Saddam agreed to exile before war
JIM KRANE Associated Press
Posted on Sat, Oct. 29, 2005
www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/13031574.htm

Has anyone done many what ifs on Robert Byrd given he's been in the US
Congress so long?

In OTL, the Jordan river is a very famous but minor river that does
not flow into any sea. WI the Jordan was a major river equal to the
Euphrates or Tigres. POD is the formation of the earth, in this ATL
the Jordan river starts somewhare in the Black Sea and flows down what

Lise Meitner, after her dismissal from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute,
bears a grude and stops communicating with Otto Hahn.  Otto Hahn
makes his famous experiment and concludes (as in OTL) that he has
found Radium.  He doesn't bother to re-check (when he would have

   The Rites in question are the rites of Confucianism. When the
Jesuits where active in China in the 16th and 17th century, they
allowed Chinese converts to practice Confucianism and all practices
associated with it, including ancestor worship. The Jesuits felt that

Steven Barnes' Lion's Blood tells of an alternate Earth in which the
dominant world power is Africa, rather than Europe or North America.
Africa's rise to power had begun when Socrates and other Greek
philosophers left Athens for Egypt, while Alexander the Great became a

A slightly slightly lighter episode before things become more serious
as the election of 1924 draws near!
Adventures in Politics Part: 11 "Wedding Bells"
Battle Hyme: The Life and Times of President "Young Phil"

Lord Cochrane of Napoleonic War infamy, participated in the naval
aspects of several nation's wars of Independence. These included Chile
1817-1822, Brazil 1823-1825, and Greece 1826-1828.
WI Thomas Cochrane died in 1816?

this certainly changes the "on to richmond" strategy of the war, spreading
out both armies and forcing the north to essentially conquer more territory
than they did.....
--

To borrow a phrase from Johnny Depp and Robert Rodriguez-
Here's the challenge, from a PoD no earlier than 1800, have Mexico lose
as little territory as possible to the US by 1880. Maximum points for
latest PoDs and maximum retention of territory

Since SHWI may be the only place on the Internet, if not the world,
with the largest concentration of people who know Robert Sobel's
seminal For Want of a Nail, and who have even written... er...
fanfiction for it, I am requesting any of you people with art skills to

Marcus Aurelius, the last of the five good emperors, was not only
famous for being killed by Joaquin Phoenix in _Gladiator_, was also a
Stoic, who composed "The Meditations" which, like Caesar's writing,
became one of the classics of Western Literature.