Radical alt-history -doesn't really focus on the Americas, but Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt has the Black Death wipe out Europe which is then re-colonised by Arabs, while China emerges as the dominant global power.
I always find it fascinating how things like the Philippine Insurgency or the various occupations of Haiti ended up almost completely erased from American popular consciousness - for that matter, most of the non-scholarly treatments of the Civil War gloss over the way the first KKK was, effectively, the post-war Southern insurgent army. Makes one wonder how or if the Afghanistan campaign will be remembered...
(Not, of course, that Australia is much better - for some reason, our involvement in the Vietnam War has been almost entirely forgotten, despite the fact that it would fit perfectly into our existing war-time narratives of "We got dragged into a great power's stupid overseas conflict/Could have done great things were it not for ignorant foreign leadership". On the other hand, we don't have the same military-industrial complex, so it's as big a gap in our understanding of our own society...)
I keep meaning to organise my thoughts and write an essay-ish thing on the total political apathy in most of the western world at the moment - linked, I think, to a sense that the current system cannot be repaired but that there's no alternatives available...
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-12 04:57 am (UTC)I always find it fascinating how things like the Philippine Insurgency or the various occupations of Haiti ended up almost completely erased from American popular consciousness - for that matter, most of the non-scholarly treatments of the Civil War gloss over the way the first KKK was, effectively, the post-war Southern insurgent army. Makes one wonder how or if the Afghanistan campaign will be remembered...
(Not, of course, that Australia is much better - for some reason, our involvement in the Vietnam War has been almost entirely forgotten, despite the fact that it would fit perfectly into our existing war-time narratives of "We got dragged into a great power's stupid overseas conflict/Could have done great things were it not for ignorant foreign leadership". On the other hand, we don't have the same military-industrial complex, so it's as big a gap in our understanding of our own society...)
I keep meaning to organise my thoughts and write an essay-ish thing on the total political apathy in most of the western world at the moment - linked, I think, to a sense that the current system cannot be repaired but that there's no alternatives available...