Prince Charles succeeds his father as 2d Duke of Edinburgh. There are now three living British princes with the title “2d Duke of…”; how often have there been even two? Continue reading →

Years ago, in a Usenet thread about Lincoln’s unconstitutional reconquest of the South, someone asked me (I paraphrase): “As a descendant of slaves, why should I prefer to live in that alternate history where the CSA continued to keep slaves after 1865?”

I had no answer then, but one has recently occurred to me:

For several reasons I believe that slavery was more likely to end if secession was successful than if the secession had never happened. If the end of slavery were not tied to a tremendous grudge of blood and devastation, might not social equality come sooner even if formal liberation came later?

I have twice raised the question: “In what country was the battle of Waterloo fought?” Waterloo is now in Belgium, but that state was created fifteen years later. Well, I finally bothered to go looking for an answer to the question . .

Waterloo was fought nine days after the end of the Congress of Vienna, during which the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, which included what we now call Belgium, was created.

Heinlein’s Starship Troopers has a teacher say that all wars are caused by population pressure.

Did Europe have a lull after 1348?