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By Gary Oswald. The London Illustrated News depicting "General Sir George Colley at the Battle of Majuba Mountain Just Before He Was Killed". Defeat portrayed as a heroic stand - something the establishment would to want to rectify. Public domain, courtesy Wikimedia Commons. William Ewart Gladstone, four-time Prime Minister of the UK, was an imperialist. He oversaw the largest empire to ever exist and that empire expanded during his time in charge. In particular he made the c

By Gary Oswald. Paul Dickov nine years after the inciting event. Photo copyright Wikipedia editor 'hst43077' but allowed for any purpose. On the 30th of May 1999 in Wembley Stadium, one of the most important moments in British sport happened. It was the 94th minute of a 90-minute Association Football game, with the score at 2-1. Five minutes had been awarded for stoppage time and so in desperation, with only a minute of the game left, the trailing team played a long ball forw

By Gary Oswald. Jessie wouldn't be so happy if Galyn Susman hadn't saved her characters models! Image courtesy Amazon marketplace. Toy Story 2 was the third feature film made by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures, a sequel to their first film Toy Story . It was an even bigger commercial and critical hit, one of the best selling and most praised animated films ever made and probably the film that truly made Pixar. Their ability to make not only multiple original

By Gary Oswald. Paperback cover, courtesy Amazon. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is the editor of the What Ifs of Jewish History   AH book and owner of the Counterfactual History Review , a blog that has been running for twelve years and covers the way counter-factual thinking has been used and viewed in the mainstream, in both fiction and analysis of the real world. He is also a prominent academic, who serves as President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Professor

By Gary Oswald. The 2020 hardcover edition; image courtesy Amazon. Literary genres are a funny thing. On the one hand they are essentially advertising, 'did you like this book? Well, it's a fantasy book and here are 200 more fantasy books, you'll like them too, please buy them'. On the other hand, it's kind of a reader's guide, telling you, the consumer, what to expect and how to engage with the text. I will react differently to the introduction of a dark handsome neighbour i

By Gary Oswald. One of the New Villages created by the British in Malaysia, where civilians were forcibly relocated to disrupt the communist insurgency. This was publicly known in 1950s Britain - how many civilians were treated by soldiers and police was known & recorded by the government. Photograph in public domain, courtesy wikimedia commons. If you spend any time at all online looking for people talking about the British Empire (and honestly if you're reading this, you pr

By Gary Oswald. So AH you can see an alternate version of it! Picture courtesy Amazon. Being enthusiasts of alternate history, everyone reading this is probably able to name an iconic piece of AH fiction in most formats. A book, a comic, a tv show, a video game etc. But it's maybe a little harder when it comes to motion pictures. There have obviously been a bunch of AH feature films but none have really been advertised as the big new AH media in the way TV shows like The Man

By Gary Oswald. Secretly a AH film? The Woman King's bluray, courtesy Amazon. Inglourious Basterds  is a 2009 Quentin Tarantino war film about allied agents operating in occupied France during 1944. Those agents are planning an assassination of Adolf Hitler and, to spoil a 16-year-old film, they shockingly actually succeed. Hitler is killed by the French resistance in 1944 rather killing himself in 1945.   That obviously has huge political and military implications. But the f

By Gary Oswald. "Oriental Warrior" by Pier Francesco Mola (1650), a painting of a contemporary Barbary pirate. Could they have dominated the Caribbean coasts? Art in public domain, provided by wikimedia commons. The European colonisation of the Americas was done by numerous countries. England, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Belgium, Netherlands, Prussia, Tuscany, Spain, France, Portugal, Norway, Malta, and Courland in modern day Latvia all made attempts to settle in vario

By Gary Oswald. Cover of the current UK e-book version, picture courtesy Amazon. The exact effect the smallpox epidemics had on the native populations of the New World is a deeply contentious historical argument. This is because there are no agreed upon population counts of how many Native Americans lived in the Americas prior to European contact in 1491. Alfred Kroeber suggested a number of around eight million people, Henry Dobyns however argued the number was above one hun

By Gary Oswald. Argentina and France's national teams battle for the ball on the cover of a 1954 sports mag. Picture in public domain and courtesy wikimedia commons. Rugby Union, like a lot of sports, was first codified in the UK and as such the four home nations (England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland) have traditionally been the heartland of the game. From there it spread to France where it became popular, helped by Vichy France banning the rival Rugby League code in 1941 and

By Gary Oswald. You all know this guy. Tutankhamun's funerary mask on display in the museum in Cairo, picture courtesy wikimedia commons. So, as I think is probably clear by my contributions to this blog, I find Alternate History interesting. I find the idea of making changes to the past and seeing what results from that exciting and compelling. But I also find the much more obscure parlour game of Alternate Historiography equally interesting. With the latter, you do not chan

By Gary Oswald. A 1905 postcard from Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), the capital of Portuguese Mozambique... which was a lot more recent a creation that such images wanted to admit! (Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons) Portuguese Mozambique officially began in 1496 when Vasco de Gama arrived in Maputo Bay and didn't end until 1975. But in reality Mozambique is a big country and for most of that time, Portugal either had no men on the ground there at all or a tiny amount of tra

By Gary Oswald. The statue of Kimpa Vita, founder of Antonianism, in Angola. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The Kingdom of Kongo was one of the largest and most powerful pre-colonial states in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its capital was in modern Angola and it dominated the mouth of the Congo river from the 14th to 18th centuries. When, in 1482, Diogo Cão of Portugal first reached that river, he recognised Kongo as ‘the greatest African Kingdom’ of that time period and made i

By Gary Oswald. Fidel Castro, photographed with fellow rebel leader Camilo Cienfuegos (left), as he enters Havana on the 9th January...

By Gary Oswald. WOS Wrestling logo, though cropped from an STV ad rather than an ITV one! Few fandoms have embraced the ‘what if’...

By Gary Oswald. A promotional image of the event; from the DHM website, copyright DWM & David von Becker. From December 2022 to January...

By D.G. Valdron Dale Cozort Jared Kavanagh Jeff Provine Edited by Gary Oswald. And if you want to read a story about this topic... This...

By D.G. Valdron Dale Cozort Jared Kavanagh Jeff Provine Edited by Gary Oswald. Domesticated bears! You know you want one. (Art by...

By Gary Oswald. The Civil Service F.C. team in 1893. A founding member of the Football Association, formed (as it said) out of...