Originally published at . You can comment here or there.

Today is the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. In an 1962 article, American Civil War historian Bruce Catton wrote:

Over the long pull, however, the proclamation had decisive importance. It changed the climate of the war, broadening its objectives and giving the Northern ( Read more... )

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My usual noble call in the case of ‘too many of the Same Thing in the alternate history genre’ is usually responded to with ‘yeah, well, this stuff you sneer at sells, so there.’

And you can’t argue sales.  People do the same old same old because they’re trained to and it’s familiar to them.   WW2 is plenty fresh in a lot of minds, and the US Civil ( Read more... )

While I’m notorious in AH circles as someone who insists that a AH story be (1) A GOOD STORY and (2) have some historical basis, not to mention (3) be one simple Point Of Divergence, not a whole mess of them (I can deal with some cascade effects, but not simultaneous stuff) - I give a lot of latitude to someone who gets those points clearly covered ( Read more... )

Susan is  still mostly *bleah* since basically collapsing around Valentine’s Day, and has been coming home a tired heap.   While Mere and I were out of the house this weekend at the con, Susan and her mom did a lot of stuff around here, and worked hard on getting her mom’s internal/personal/financial papers in some order.

Mere has been in much ( Read more... )

• “The way to a woman’s BLANK is through her BLANK“,
• the Obama’s dog will be a BLANK,
• Nixon and LBJ had worried opinions about the BLANKs all around them, as did the FBI
• Jefferson Davis had a BLANK spy in his home and
  
• Teaching BLANK language in Summer School can get dangerous.  (h/t Deb Geisler)

About to shut down and go off to the podiatrist’s office for another visit.   The inserts are working well, but this blood blister thing is healing very slowly, and he’s watching that.

I’m being a very good boy re the feet, including last weekend.

Meredith has a killer schedule this week and is sucking us into it; skating practice late this ( Read more... )

In early December on the LJ side, I did a ‘rate the Presidents’ competition to see what my readers thought of the US Presidents.  The raw results and comments are still there  - and these are the results, sorted by Mean (statistical results under the cut; the spreadsheet itself is here).

Sets: One (Washington -> Harrison), Two (Tyler->McKinley), ( Read more... )

An alternate history idea I’d had for a long time just went down the sewer.

Porter Alexander, Lee’s artillery chief at the end of the war, was at the final council at Appomattox when Lee discussed what to do next with his officers.   Alexander described the situation in his memoirs in detail; he suggested that Lee order the men to scatter and ( Read more... )