This first one, I doubt anyone would really care about, but I think it would be interesting:
The Paducah (Ky.) Great Flood of 1937 never happens. As a result, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the TVA never build Kentucky and Barkley Dams. It takes another 20 years before the Jackson Purchase is completely electrified, and when the Ohio, Tennessee and Cumberland rivers spill their banks in the late 1960s, it floods the Paducah gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment plant, spreading radiation over most of the Purchase.
Here’s one that might be interesting:
Kaiser Wilhelm decides to attempt “Operation Pastorius” (the covert invasion of America) during WWI instead of Hitler in WWII as a preemptive strike against the United States. This time, though, the German invasion teams don’t get busted on the Jersey shore by the Coast Guard and slip into the country easily, sabotaging factories and rail stations. The unrest caused by the series of attacks prevents Woodrow Wilson from being re-elected, and as a result the United States is both unable and unwilling to enter World War I.
Without U.S. reinforcements, the Allied forces are decimated and most of Europe is under German control. Hitler never comes to power, avoiding our WWII, but can the new Germany and America avoid a major conflict?
All in all, Woody Wilson came darn close to being a dictator as it was. A homeland threat in those days might have been enough to have pushed the poor boy over the edge.
Lenin had little to do with the revolution itself, the actual planning was largely Trotsky. Without Lenin the Bolshevik leadership struggle would start much earlier (Stalin never becomes Soviet leader?).
What about one involving Henry VIII, such as the Pilgrimage of Grace succeeding, or France and the Holy Roman Empire agreeing to the Pope’s wishes and invading England? Both would have far reaching effects.
Francisco Pizarro’s men desert him after he draws the ‘line in the sand’. Pizarro returns to Panama a broken and bankrupt man, never to be heard from again. Consequently he never discovers the Inca Empire.
Joseph Jughashvili, a slightly more “spiritually inclined” (some would say obsessed) young man, never leaves the seminary. But he doesn’t stay out of history’s way—he becomes fanatically opposed to “godless” bolshevism, and after the Russian Revolution, he founds a violent theocratic organization calling itself Sobor—“Cathedral”—and disappears underground, gaining wide support among Ukrainian Cossacks.
After his followers’ infamous 1935 suicide hijacking of the ANT-20 “Maxim Gorky,” which was rammed into the Kremlin, killing hundreds, Jughashvili—called “Steel Man” or Stalin in his organization—is the most wanted man in Eurasia. And now, on the brink of the second great war, there are fears that he and his forces might ally with German invaders…
How geeky am I? I saw all that in a dream, last night.
This idea, with fantasy elements added is the basis of Eric Flint, Dave Freer and Mercedes Lackey’s “Heirs of Alexandria” series, which begins with The Shadow of the Lion. Characters include an alterate version of Ignatious Loyola. I enjoyed the book quite a lot.
One of the break points I’d like to see, which would take a LOT of work, to make it plausible, would be to change the outcome of the Spanish-American War. What would have happened to the US, and the world, had the Phillipines, Cuba and Puerto Rico been incorporated as states in the United States, instead of territories? Battista, and Castro, for one would never had happened. Nor much of the latter day chaos in the Phillipines revolving around the Marcos and their successors. However, would such grafting work? Not just from the POV of the mainland Americans but from the POV of the various former Spanish territories? Would the large islamic population of the Phillipines be working, even now, to succeed from the US?
No answers, yet, but a fun bit of thinking, I think.
I’ve seen all of those except ‘Congo takes over Belgium’.
In the background for ‘Wasteland of Flint’ Japanese fleeing Mongolian invaders settle on the west coast of North America in app. 1200AD. They start trading with the Toltecs and other tribes. When the Aztecs rise to power, they have access to steel and horses. Needless to say, conquistadores don’t do very well in this history, but their missionaries (who end up in the Americas about 50 years early in this history) get some converts among the Maya, and when the Mexica Empire conquers them they end up adopting a form of Christianity that equates Quetzalcoatl to Jesus and various other gods with the saints, along with Buddhist ideas already borrowed from the North American Japanese. The Aztecs become very expansionistic and build a large and advanced naval fleet, colonize parts of North Africa in the 16th century, ally with Scotland in the 17th century and thoroughly mess up British history, and finally complete their conquest of humanity in the 24th century by defeating the Swedish-Russians.
Most of this detail isn’t in the book (or at least, in the first of the series, the only one I read), but the background for the series was apparently created for and by a pen-and-paper alternate history strategy game called ‘Lords of the Earth’ and is very detailed. If you like alternate history, you might find this link interesting.
As to the ‘India taking over England’ scenario - in ‘The Peshawar Lancers’ by S.M. Stirling several comet fragments hit the Earth in 1878, landing in an arc running from east of Moscow to across most of North America. England manages to avoid a direct hit, so comes out of it better than most of Europe, but there is still mass starvation as the Earth suffers effects similar to a nuclear winter (several years without sun), and Disraeli moves the government of the British Empire to India, along with 25% of England’s surviving population. The novel is set in 2025, electricity’s primary use is telegraphs, motorcars are a rarity, and the primary forms of transportation are rail, steamship, and dirigible, yet biological technology is nearly as advanced as ours (in some ways, more so). The most powerful force in the world is the British Empire, now known as the Angrezi Raj, although there is strong competition from Dai Nippon (a Japanese empire that encompasses most of China) and cannibalistic Tchernobog-worshipping Russians. Fun stuff.