Alternative history and the bloggers who love it

Here are a couple of terrific sites to check out today ... because it's Tuesday and the week is already shaping up to be too hot to go outside.

The Today in Alternate History blog is a lovingly-written digest by Robbie Taylor, all about historical events that never were:

In 1831, African slave Nat Turner leads a rebellion against the slaveholders of Virginia. After killing his own masters, Turner began freeing every slave in the county; soon, he had followers numbering in the thousands. He led them west, slaughtering any who stood in the way, and they founded the nation of Uhuru, which was Swahili for freedom.

And then closer to home, Typepadder Michel Vuijlsteke writes the Annotated Alternate History blog. He takes entries from TIAH and explains the actual events.

Comments

[Anthony]

If he did, what an irony cause Swahili isn't a "real African language", it's a polyglot trading language created by Arab slavers to facilitate their "business" back in the good old days when there was no white European slave trade in Africa....
Or did they forget to tell you about that in Identity Politics 101?
And if he did nmove all those freed slaves westward, I suspect that large groups of native Americans (or whatever the hell they were back then) might have a thing or two to say about an invading mass of people come stomping in their neighborhood, using up local environmental resources and maybe sometimes forgetting that all Oppressed People of Color are genetically disposed to live in harmony with one another because of their eternal opression and opressiveness!
Sorry to be the Evil White Male European Patriarchal Purveyor of HIStory, but facts are facts and don't go away in even alternative universes...
By the way, anyone who tries to feed you that HIS-story BS is likely after your wallet as well. The word history, derived from the latin word "histoires" means, pure and simple, a "story or tale"--it has ZERO gender connotations and anyone who thinks that bit of post-structuralist cheese word play counts as "inciteful critique of patriarchal language structures" is probably laughing as s/he walks away!!

[pam]

Oppressed people are predisposed to live together in their oppression? You make no sense at all, but you're so much fun. This sort of mood of yours is so highly bloggable. But someday, you will know this instinctively, and you will jump into bed with the genre that waits to embrace you and your clever but incendiary angry white male views.

[Anthony]

No, what I meant to say was that, pace the standard 60s Malcolm/Huey/Ho Chi Mihn Party Line, not all oppressed peoples of the world are automatically guaranteed to live together in harmony because they've been both opressed by The Man. The idea that Alternative Nat's nation of Angry Millions would just be able to march into territory already being contested by European (sorry--white imperialist genocidal linear patriarchal melanin-deprived Ice People) settlers and the native Americans (or whatever they were back then) without a single casualty is funny, not to say untrue....
"Angery white male views"...In the words of one of Woody Allen's wives in "Annie Hall": "I love being reduced to a cultural steretype." I will remind you that I voted for Gore, will vote for Kerry, I despise the entire Fox News/MSNBC/Rush/Hannity/Coulter/O'Reilly Axis of Stupidity. I just think that if the Left thinks its going to win by being as stupid and doctrinaire and narrow as the Right they're dead wrong, cause the Right is SO MUCH BETTER at being stupid and doctrinaire and narrow!

[pam]

I agree. I imagine that, if he had continued with the timeline in that particular make-believe digest, he might have said that the black slaves and the indiginies fought bloody wars in the West, before they either crafted a treaty or one group was eradicated. Or the whites mustered an army and joined the fray themselves. Or the blacks made it up to what we know as Wisconsin, and the French & Indians gave them territory out of sympathy. Later, territory became a sovereign nation with lots of casinos on it. Any ending you choose makes for intriguing, if *fictitious*, alternate history. (And I know you have always defied stereotype.)(I get just as mad when you tell BB that my place is in the kitchen.)