1)– THE DEATH OF OGEDEI KAHN
Ogedei Khan, the son of Genghis Khan, died in 1241. Shortly before Ogedei died he approved a plan to invade Western Europe. The execution of the plan was to be carried out by Batu Khan. However, when Ogedei Khan died, it took five years for Mongol princes to elect a replacement Emperor By the time the new emperor took power, Batu Kahn felt he was too old and weak to invade Western Europe. The Mongols would never again come close to conquering the region.
Good thing, that. Because it was during this time that the basic ideas of “modern” banking and the concepts of capitalism were being developed in Austria. A Mongol invasion at such a time could very well have ended these early forays into what is currently the most prominent economic system in the world.
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2)—NORWEGIAN COMMANDO DESTROYS GERMAN HEAVY WATER SUPPLY
Germany had the scientific ability to generate a nuclear weapon, but they lacked the materials. A nuclear weapon program requires a large quantity of “heavy water”, a.k.a., Deuterium Oxide. It is used to produce isotopes for nuclear weapons — a.k.a., Plutonium-239. A fertilizer production plant in Norway had been producing heavy water since 1934, at the rate of twelve tons per year.
Recognizing that German scientists were trying to create a nuclear weapon, Allied special forces alerted Norwegian resistance groups in 1940, encouraging them to destroy the facilities. They failed several times. Finally, in 1944, a single Norwegian commando managed to sneak onto a ferry carrying hard water and sink it. The war wasn’t going well for Germany at this point, and this ended Germany’s plan to acquire nuclear weapons. Had it not been for the Norwegian resistance, Germany may well have been able to create an atomic bomb—altering the war, and changing world history.
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3)– SHOGUN LEMITSU EXPELS CHRISTIANS FROM JAPAN
Catholic Missionaries in early 1600’s Japan were successful in converting a number of powerful feudal lords to Catholicism. In 1639, Shogun Tokugawa Lemitsu, alarmed at the fast growing Christian population … and the rebellions that these groups were causing … expelled ALL Christians from the island.
The following is conjecture, of course, but it is highly reasonable. Had Tokugawa not expelled the Christians, it is most likely that, with time, a Catholic Shogun would have risen to power. An allegiance to the Pope would have fostered an alliance with France and Spain … and had Japan been on the side of France and Spain during the Seven Years’ War against England, it is probable that the British would have been defeated. Such a defeat would have made the colonization of America by the British unlikely— thus reshaping the world entirely as we know it.
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4)– THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION OF 1791
Haiti —- or, as the French called it, Saint-Domingue —- became independent following a violent slave revolt from 1791 – 1804. The island’s sugar cane crop proved to be lucrative business among the wealthy in Europe. More importantly, Napoleon used the funds from these sugar cane plantations to establish a foothold in Louisiana. Not only was Napoleon unable to quell the rebellion …. it broke the Froggie bank.
Deeply in debt after thirteen years of fighting a war against the Haitians, Napoleon sold the American government its Louisiana territories at a remarkably low price ….. the Louisiana purchase. Not only did the Haitian Revolution help form the modern day United States; it also prevented France from attempting to build its desired North American Empire.
[Blood Sucking Mosquitoes (the insect, not US Congressman) also helped defeat France. In the spring of 1802 Napoleon had sent a formidable army under his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, to quell the Haitian rebellion. On April 19, Leclerc reported to Napoleon that the rainy season had arrived, and his troops were falling ill. By the end of the year, almost the whole French force, including Leclerc himself, were dead of mosquito-borne yellow fever.]
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5)– THE CRIMEAN WAR IN 1854
Quick background. The Ottoman Empire had nothing to do with soft cushy recliners. It was a Turkish Empire that lasted from 1299 – 1922. At their height of power the empire stretched from Vienna to much of southeast Europe, Western Asia (middle east) and North Africa.
The Crimean War; Russia on one side. The Ottoman Empire, the French Empire, and the British Empire on the other side. The Russians lost. However ….. the Ottoman Empire was forced to take out massive loans from France and England to pay for the war.
Fast forward sixty years to WWI. The Ottomans decided to side with the Germans. Why? Because they were still heavily indebted to the French and English …. they thought the Germans would win …. and a victory would nullify their debt. The Ottomans picked the wrong team. France and England were really pissed off and were going to enact revenge. They split the Ottoman Empire into a number of nations, creating new borders and political entities …. an area we now refer to as the Middle-East. So debt from the Crimean War of 1854 sowed the seed for a great many of the problems we find in the Middle East today.
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6)– THE WOBBLY CHAIR
5 rounds at 25 feet …. a man who can’t see out of one eye and blind in the other could make that shot. But, not on Feb 15, 1933. Anarchist Giuseppe Zangara lost his balance atop a wobbly chair, and instead of hitting President-elect FDR, he fatally wounded the mayor of Chicago (who was shaking hands with F.D.R.)
If Giuseppe hit his mark, FDR’s conservative Texas running mate, John Nance Garner, would have come to power. Scholars are confident the world would be very different. For example, Professor Alan Brinkley of Columbia University stated — “The New Deal, the move toward internationalism — these would never have happened. FDR’s assassination would have changed the history of the world in the 20th century.”
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7)– GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER
On June 20, 1790, Thomas Jefferson invited Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to dinner at his rented house in Lower Manhattan. In the course of the evening, these three men brokered one of the great political deals in American history. They decided that the national capital would be situated on the Potomac, and that the federal government would agree to take on the enormous war debts of the 13 states.
Otherwise, New York might still be the nation’s capital. More importantly, the primacy of the central government might never have been established. Ron Chernow, the Hamilton biographer, writes —- “The assumption of state debts was the most powerful bonding mechanism of the new Union. Without it, we would have had a far more decentralized federal system.”
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8)– AN ACT OF MERCY THAT WOUND UP TERRORIZING THE WORLD
The banks of the River Inn provided an idyllic setting for the children to play. In 1894, while playing tag with a group of other children, the way many children do in Passau to this day, the four year old boy – who could not swim — fell into the river. The current was very strong and the water ice cold, flowing as it did straight from the mountains. No one could survive for more than a minute or two in such conditions, especially a child. Luckily, a man who lived close by, Johann Kuehberger (who would later become Europe’s most famous organist), dove in the icy waters and saved the terrified child —- whose first name was Adolph.
AWD says:
Great stuff, Stuck
#9 A butterfly flapped it’s wings in Brazil, and caused hurricane Sandy.
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14th March 2013 at 8:22 pm
anotherjohn says:
i am getting used to learning stuff from prof stuckenheimer. although for years i thought it was sgt rock who had foiled the german’s efforts to acquire heavy water. i guess that comic wasn’t historically accurate.
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14th March 2013 at 8:59 pm
SSS says:
#7 is the only one with some degree of credibility, ie. absent a bunch of hypothetical links to what might have been. And even that one is not well documented, although it has been written about. But here’s the best part from #7 …..
“The assumption of state debts was the most powerful bonding mechanism of the new Union. Without it, we would have had a far more decentralized federal system.”
If that is an accurate assessment, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton really fucked up.
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14th March 2013 at 9:01 pm
AWD says:
#10 AWD posted a picture of hot woman, and Stucky got a hard on
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14th March 2013 at 9:08 pm
Stucky says:
SSS
The stories themselves are all factual.
Of course, since no one can see the future, the conclusions are speculative. Some more then others. What do you think would have changed had FDR been assassinated?
Are you credible, spook boy?
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14th March 2013 at 9:13 pm
T4C says:
I love learning new shit. Professor Stuck are there going to be pop quizzes on this info or will it be open-book?
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14th March 2013 at 9:13 pm
Stucky says:
#11
SSS blows a fucking gasket upon seeing a nipple
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14th March 2013 at 9:16 pm
Stucky says:
T4C
My classes are modeled after the New American Teaching Method.
No quizzes. No tests. No homework. Everybody passes with an “A” as long as they feel good about themselves.
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14th March 2013 at 9:20 pm
Zarathustra says:
#2 is true, but even if the shipment had made it to Germany, there was a very small likelihood that Germany would have been able to built a heavy water reactor and actually produce a weapon before the plant had the living fuck blown out of it. Not to mention that they had no means of delivering what would no doubt have been a nuke every bit as bulky and crude as the one that was dropped on Hiroshima…and Germany had nothing even remotely capable of carrying such a device.
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14th March 2013 at 9:42 pm
AKAnon says:
I call bullshit on #2. It was Hogan’s Heroes that defeated the Krauts’ “heavy water” nuclear ambitions. If we could get that little Frenchie LeBou and Richard Dawson into Iran, they might solve the problems in the ME.
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14th March 2013 at 9:50 pm
anotherjohn says:
considering i only had a hint of h.s. i would like to know what the degree requirements are
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14th March 2013 at 9:56 pm
DaveL says:
#9. A friend of mine who was a TSA guy stopped someone from taking a gun to Washington, DC.
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14th March 2013 at 10:00 pm
IndenturedServant says:
I recall seeing a documentary in the early 2000′s I think, that documented the recovery of the heavy water shipment. If my memory is correct, the containers were still intact filled with heavy water.
I_S
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14th March 2013 at 10:04 pm
Stucky says:
Zara
What about the V-2 rockets?
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14th March 2013 at 11:14 pm
Stucky says:
Nearing a Nazi bomb
“Uranium machines needed a moderator, a substance that would slow down the neutrons liberated by chain reactions. In the end, the project decided to use heavy water—oxygen combined with the rare heavy isotope of hydrogen—instead of water or graphite. This was not (as one of the many myths associated with the German nuclear weapons effort had it) because of a mistake the physicist Walther Bothe made when he measured the neutron absorption of graphite. Rather, it appeared that the Norsk Hydro plant in occupied Norway could provide the amounts of heavy water they needed in the first stage of development at a relatively low cost.
“The Norwegian resistance and Allied bombers eventually put a stop to Norwegian production of heavy water (see Norwegian Resistance Coup and See the Spy Messages. But by that time it was not possible to begin the production of either pure graphite or pure heavy water in Germany. In the end, the German scientists had only enough heavy water to conduct one or two large-scale nuclear reactor experiments at a time.
“By the very end of the war, the Germans had progressed from horizontal and spherical layer designs to three-dimensional lattices of uranium cubes immersed in heavy water. They had also developed a nuclear reactor design that almost, but not quite, achieved a controlled and sustained nuclear fission chain reaction. During the last months of the war, a small group of scientists working in secret under Diebner and with the strong support of the physicist Walther Gerlach, who was by that time head of the uranium project, BUILT AND TESTED A NUCLEAR DEVICE. ”
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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/nazis-and-the-bomb.html
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14th March 2013 at 11:21 pm
Stucky says:
The historican R. Karlsch published a book — “Hitlers Bombe. Die geheime Geschichte der deutschen Kernwaffenversuch”) — Hitlers Bomb: The secret history of German Atomic Weapons Research ———– (don’t think it’s available in English.)
Main points
1— He proves that a group of scientusts succesfully build a nucler reactor at Gottow … therefore theoretically possible to make Plutonium (confirmed by government documentation)
2— The Germans succeeded testing at least two nuclear weapons (October ´44 and March ’45 and produced a very small scale nuclear chain reaction (He found documented physical and chemical evidence for both tests)
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14th March 2013 at 11:43 pm
Zarathustra says:
Stucky says:
Zara
What about the V-2 rockets?
Sure, if the germans could create a miniaturized atom bomb that weighed 2,000 lbs. Remember, it took a B29 (that had twice the payload of a B17) to carry a single US built bomb.
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14th March 2013 at 12:12 am
TPC says:
“T4C
My classes are modeled after the New American Teaching Method.
No quizzes. No tests. No homework. Everybody passes with an “A” as long as they feel good about themselves.”
The Finn’s actually have a system somewhat like that, and churn out the most educated students in the world.
Source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html
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14th March 2013 at 9:16 am
flash says:
I’ve read that Genghis Khan had freed the tradesmen to create as they saw fit in every province he conquered and had put to the sword all those in power who oppresses the free power of productivity.
That said, it might have been beneficial to all Europeans if the Mongols had conquered the bastion of mercantilism.
And thus,the world may not be still suffering under company owned government.
http://www.somareview.com/genghis_khan.cfm
Author Jack Weatherford hopes to dispel this image. In his superb book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Weatherford presents the 13th century conqueror as a progressive and innovative ruler who not only established international law but subordinated his own power to it. He promoted social tolerance and humanitarian values, outlawing torture, abolishing the sale of women, granting diplomatic immunity, and establishing free trade. He even built schools and championed literacy (thanks to Genghis Khan, Mongolia today has a higher literacy rate than the United States).
Genghis Kahn’s contributions to Western civilization can hardly be overstated. His trade routes introduced to Europe technologies such as printing, the cannon, compass, and the abacus, as well as Mongol products like tea, lemons, carrots, playing cards, rugs, and pants. The Mongols also developed the first international postal system and paper currency.
True, Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people than anyone else in history. Using rapid siege and attack warfare that inspired the German blitzkrieg, Genghis Khan conquered more nations in 25 years than the Romans did in 400. But he extended and sustained his empire by exercising shrewd diplomacy (and wily propaganda) as well as military might. By winning over opponents with his considerable charisma, by marrying and adopting children for political purposes, and by rewarding loyalty and punishing dissent, Genghis Khan accomplished what no one had dreamed possible—he overcame 10,000 years of fierce tribal warfare to unify Mongolia. The khan and his successors ruled their empire so wisely, and so benevolently, that an age of unprecedented peace and open trade flourished over the next 150 years.
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14th March 2013 at 9:24 am
TPC says:
That book is very well done. I’ve read it a number of times.
“That said, it might have been beneficial to all Europeans if the Mongols had conquered the bastion of mercantilism.”
I tend to agree.
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14th March 2013 at 9:28 am
TPC says:
Interesting but convoluted history here.. This is more evidence that religion is not the real protagonist in warfare.The prize is the wealth stored in controlling the land and resources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem
In the Siege of Jerusalem (614), after 21 days of relentless siege warfare, Jerusalem was captured. The Byzantine chronicles relate that the Sassanid army and the Jews slaughtered tens of thousands of Christians in the city, many at the Mamilla Pool and destroyed its Byzantine monuments and churches, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The episode has been the subject of much debate between historians.[108] The conquered city would remain in Sassanid hands for some fifteen years until the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius reconquered it in 629.[109]
When the Muslims went to Bayt Al-Maqdes for the first time, They searched for the site of the Far Away Holy Mosque (Al-Masjed Al-Aqsa) that was mentioned in Quran and Hadith according to Islamic beliefs. Contemporary Arabic and Hebrew sources say the site was full of rubbish, and that Arabs and Jews cleaned it.[119] The Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik commissioned the construction of the Dome of the Rock in the late 7th century.[120] The 10th century historian al-Muqaddasi writes that Abd al-Malik built the shrine in order to compete in grandeur with Jerusalem’s monumental churches.[118]
In 1099, The Fatimid ruler expelled the native Christian population before Jerusalem was conquered by the Crusaders, who massacred most of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants when they took the solidly defended city by assault, after a period of siege, and left the city emptied of people; later the Crusaders created the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
In 1187, the city was wrested from the Crusaders by Saladin who permitted Jews and Muslims to return and settle in the city.[125] Under the terms of surrender, once ransomed, 60,000 Franks were expelled. The Eastern Christian populace was permitted to stay
In 1244, Jerusalem was sacked by the Khwarezmian Tartars, who decimated the city’s Christian population and drove out the Jews.[128] The Khwarezmian Tartars were driven out by the Ayyubids in 1247. From 1250 to 1517, Jerusalem was ruled by the Mamluks. During this period of time many clashes occurred between the Mamluks on one side and the crusaders and the Mongols on the other side.
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14th March 2013 at 9:43 am
flash says:
..sorry TPC. That post was mine.
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14th March 2013 at 9:44 am
AWD says:
Geez, fun bags aren’t for feeding
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14th March 2013 at 10:05 am
JJ3 says:
Crazy, I read #1 and was amazed. Why? I have been listening to the Wrath of the Khans podscast series – Hardcore History podcast and they just told that story this morning of the Khan dying as they were ready to invade Europe. Coincidence?
More than likely.
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14th March 2013 at 10:50 am
Stucky says:
flash
Interesting stuff you posted about the Mongols. Fun to read.
In doing my “research” for this post — which is by no means extensive, I just look for interesting and fun stuff to write a very brief paragraph about — I was surprised at the number of “near death” experiences Hitler had … the botched assassination attempt that came oh-so-close, a bullet that lodged in a book (or, medal?) when he was a bicycle courier in WWI, and others. My, oh, my … how the world would have been different had he not survived!!
(Not to mention how the outcome of the war might have been different had he actually listened to his Generals and scientists!)
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14th March 2013 at 11:31 am