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That might have been just days away from happening at the end of World War II. As the war drew to a close, the next conflict was already emerging, with the Soviets and the rest of the Allies each trying to gain control over the defeated Axis countries. Well, that exact thing almost happened to Japan. Getty "The southern half will be known as South Japan. The northern will be known as Eastern Kentucky. In August of , the final days of the war, the Soviets rolled a fearsome ground army into Japanese-controlled Manchuria to push the outlying forces back.
This was part of a joint Allied strategy and actually began the same day as the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, because this strategy was apparently codenamed Japan Can Go Straight to Hell. Japan was thoroughly crushed by the combined offensive we daresay probably more so by the two doomsday explosions leveled at them with weapons that no one had ever seen before and surrendered six days later, signing the official surrender documents in early September.
However, according to some historians , the USSR originally had no intention of stopping at Manchuria. It was supposed to be the pre-game show of a full-scale invasion of Japan itself, which would've seen the Red Army folk-dance its way across the Pacific Ocean and squat-kick the island nation into submission. Getty It would have looked exactly like this. The Soviets planned to begin their invasion in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido in late August, a full two months before the Allied invasion, Operation Olympic , was scheduled to take place.
However, Stalin kept his plan a secret from the other Allied forces and had absolutely no intention of telling them anything about it, preferring to wait until the forces of Operation Olympic stormed the shores of Japan to find him sitting in the emperor's palace watching cartoons. In fact, some theorize that Japan surrendered not because they were afraid of more atomic bombs from the U. So what would have happened if Stalin had managed to plunge his forces into Japan before the war had ended?
We'll never know, but based on how it went down with the other disputed territories, it's easy to guess. Stalin would've had a legitimate claim to, if nothing else, split the island in two once the war was over, maybe with a North and South Japan possibly even a partitioned Tokyo , with a hotly contested border constantly patrolled on either side by varying groups of aggressively non-Japanese people.
Getty We'll let you guess which side this would have been. How would that have changed the complexion of the Cold War? Would Japan have still become the economic and technological powerhouse it is today? Would there have been a weird Japanese version of Kim Jong Il? It sets so many dominoes in motion that it hurts the brain to think about it.
As you probably can guess from the whole "country almost split in two during his administration" thing, Abraham Lincoln was one of the most polarizing presidents in American history. People threatened to kill him pretty much all the goddamned time -- by some estimates, he received more than 10, death threats during his first term alone keep in mind that this was the s, before death threats became the currency of the Internet.
Chief among those threats was the Baltimore Plot , one of the earliest and most serious assassination attempts ever hatched against the president. Had it been successful as it very nearly was , Abraham Lincoln would have been murdered before he'd ever served a single day as president, and Bill and Ted would've definitely failed their history project. According to the CIA , the plot called for Lincoln to be assassinated while passing through Baltimore by train en route to his inauguration in February of Baltimore was already a hotbed of Confederate-leaning Abe haters , so the conspirators simply hired a bunch of them to stage a riot as the president-elect's train passed through, thus creating enough chaotic distraction to allow an assassin to appear out of the crowd and blast Lincoln.
It's not like the Secret Service existed yet, so the deed wouldn't have been too hard to accomplish. Once the plot was discovered and confirmed by several independent investigators, Lincoln's itinerary was changed at the last minute into a circuitous riddle involving multiple train changes, carriage rides, and telegraph offices to keep his location secret.
He arrived in Washington in complete anonymity. That's right: This was the president-elect of the United States, and they had to hide him to keep him from being killed. The Virginia Company of England was the first to set sail to the land eventually named Virginia in honor of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen and the settlers eventually grew enough tobacco in Jamestown to make it a successful colony for England.
There is so much to unpack about the importance of this episode, which marked the real start of the colonization of what is now America, but not before genocide, slavery, starvation, and violence preceded it. In he published The Starry Messenger which put him on a path to clash with the Catholic Church over whether or not the Earth was at the center of the universe. The mass production of British iron and the harnessing of steam power were the main thrusts behind the revolution and the economic impact of machinery was staggering.
For the first time, the population began to increase consistently as factories opened, jobs became available, and people could afford to sustain a family. Of course, this also brought long hours, hard labor, and overwork — hallmarks of our daily life in a capitalist society.
Fed up with high British taxes on tea brought to America, the colonists dumped entire shiploads of the stuff into the Boston harbor to show the British king that the colonies would not stand for taxation without appropriate representation in the British government. While it would be another 2 years before the revolution would start with the battles of Lexington and Concord and 3 years before the Declaration of Independence, this event is often seen as a tipping point towards American independence.
The Bastille was a fortress used by French kings to imprison political prisoners and the common people saw it as a symbol of an oppressive monarchy. Despite support, it would be a long time before women would gain the right to vote. In fact, in Susan B. Anthony would be arrested while trying to vote in a presidential election. New Zealand was the first country to grant suffrage the right to vote to its women in and the U.
But Australia, Finland, and part of the Russian Empire would all grant suffrage to women before the 19th Amendment was finally added to the U. Constitution in Up until that point, more soldiers tended to die from infections than from battle wounds. WWII was the first war that allowed those infections to be treated successfully, thanks to penicillin.
Sadly, our abuse of antibiotics has led to even worse infections that are resistant to modern interventions. The Jewish population has never recovered from the Holocaust. The Cultural Revolution had begun and would change China and the U. These were unprecedented acts of war the likes of which we have luckily never seen again.
While Hitler was already dead and the Germans had surrendered, the Americans chose to secure Japanese surrender with the most brutal weapon ever employed. This act has led to decades of debate about whether it was a necessary measure and it also encouraged other countries to become nuclear powers. By launching the first object into space, the Soviets put America on the defensive when it came to technological advancement.
The Soviets also sent the first man to space in and all of this led to the U. His powerful words delivered to the largest audience ever on the mall up until that point put pressure on President Lyndon B. Johnson to push civil rights laws through Congress. Half a million workers were needed to contain the contamination and the long term effects on their health are still being determined.
Because no one wanted to be responsible for putting down the protest, guards allowed it to go on. The next year, Germany was reunified and the Soviet Union effectively collapsed in , events that largely ended the Cold War. It also changed the way that Muslims were treated throughout the country and has had long-lasting effects on the way we travel, vote, and interact with the rest of the world.
Later, they expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, then to the Ivy League, other universities, high schools — and then to everyone and their grandmother. Now, there are over two billion Facebook users in the world. Life Entertainment Trending Shopping. All Life Food Travel. All Trending. Amazon Shopping. All Amazon Shopping. All Shopping Amazon. About Terms Privacy. All rights reserved. Wikimedia Commons Source:. Nevertheless, the Chinese had their own blossoming civilization with brilliant literature, philosophy, and science.
The assassination of Julius Ceasar — 44BC. It would be almost years until the Roman Empire would be well and fully dismantled. The crucifixion of Jesus, 30AD. Whether or not he was the son of God, his life would change the course of history as we know it. Trevelyan, suggested that Napoleon would lose interest in expanding his empire, partly because his health was suffering, and partly because the mood in Paris was for peace.
England, however, would suffer economically, with many people starving. The poet Lord Byron would lead a popular uprising against the government, which would be suppressed. Byron's execution, of course, would only inspire revolution. Meanwhile, a war of independence would stir in South America. With Napoleon ailing, the French government would nearly cease functioning, attacked from all sides. The essay ended there — on a cliffhanger. Of course, the idea has also been popular in fiction.
The popular Harry Turtledove, who specializes in alternate history novels, has suggested what might have happened — in 11 volumes so far. The first novel, How Few Remain , introduced a world where, years after the war, the former USA is divided into two nations: the U. Using advanced technology, the U.
In the South, post-war measures lead to runaway inflation, poverty, and the victory of the violent Freedom party. In the Second Great War , three American cities and six European cities are destroyed in nuclear attacks.
At the end of the war, the U. Sadly, it is too late for the South to rejoin the Union. Instead, the CSA is offered neither independence nor civil rights, but is kept under military rule. This envisions a world in which the U. The United States invades Cuba, making the Crisis escalate into nuclear warfare. However, all surviving nations renounce their possession of nuclear weapons — with the exception of the USA, now under martial law as the military had planned all along.
Playwright Douglas Mendin, in a story for Entertainment Weekly , imagined that Monroe would survive, dedicate herself to serious acting, and win an Oscar in , with no make-up and her hair dyed brown. She would then record a hit song with Frank Sinatra, make bad films, and give up acting in to look after her drug-addicted twin sons. Then there was the American supermarket tabloid The Sun. According to The Sun , after threatening to reveal an affair with Robert Kennedy, she was drugged, brainwashed and taken to Australia, where she lives the "simple life of a sheep rancher's wife.
Effect : Due to advanced technology, the Industrial Revolution happens years early. Explanation : Shakespeare has impressed scholars not only with his literary brilliance, but also with the historical detail of his plays.
He did get a few things wrong, however—such as having a clock strike in Julius Caesar , years before such clocks were invented. Hence, fairies and other magical beings exist on this world, and the clockwork technology of Ancient Rome advanced to the stage where, in the age of Cromwell, steam trains are already running through England. In the book, a teenage math genius is mysteriously summoned to the Smithsonian Institution in , where he glimpses the upcoming World War II.
Determined to prevent it, he goes back in history to seek its origins. One of the most intriguing was a universe where Sinatra was never born, and is therefore unable to use his influence to get President Kennedy elected in That bit was never explained. Explanation : Any reality envisioned by Philip K. Dick was bound to be fascinating. His novel The Man in the High Castle , which established him as a top science fiction writer, is set in a world where the Axis powers win World War II in and divide most of the world between them.
Bricker, the U. In the America of , slavery is legal once again, and the few surviving Jews hide out under assumed names. However, the Nazis have the hydrogen bomb, which also gives them the technology to fuel super-fast air travel and colonize space. This book, with its historical commentary, made many critics take sci-fi far more seriously, showing that it was more than just alien invasions and spaceships.
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