The Trans-Saharan railway that wasn’t
In March 1941, Vichy France started building a railway across West Africa that was meant to link up Algiers, Casablanca and Tunis in the north with Dakar in the west and Abidjan, the capital of Côte d’Ivoir, in the south.
Construction never got farther than Béni Abbès, an oasis town in the Algerian desert.
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#HistoryReview of Mike Resnick’s Alternate Presidents
Every four years, American voters get the chance to elect a new president. The choices voters, and sometimes the House of Representatives, made on those occasions have been a rich vein from which alternate-history writers have drawn to tell stories. The late but prolific writer and editor Mike Resnick certainly thought so, commissioning a volume with more than two dozen such tales. Published as…
1898: Our Last Men in the Philippines shows the great bluff that is imperialism as Spanish men die ingloriously abroad for nothing
Many of us in the Western world might think of Southeast Asia as a dense jungle where white people go to die. The French and the Americans died in Vietnam. The Dutch died in Indonesia. The British died in Malaya.
The Philippines are often overlooked. Americans may remember the islands played a role in World War II. They will speak of Corregidor (properly with a rolled “r” and a “g” pronounced…
A century after they were first imagined, flying wings still look futuristic
Nothing says future of aviation like a flying wing. A century after they were first imagined, they still look futuristic. Probably because so few of them have flown.
Dieselpunk loves to stock the Nazi air fleet with flying wings designed by the brother Walter and Reimar Horten, but they weren’t the only pioneers in the field. America’s Jack Northrop, founder of the Northrop Corporation, was…
A fun spy adventure in Nazi-occupied France: Our review of Stephen Hunter’s Basil’s War
Even as we pass eighty years since the days of Spitfires and Messerschmitts, Britain’s fight against the Nazis maintains an heroic luster. To many Britons, it was their country’s finest hour as people came together to withstand the German bomber fleets. Even many Americans like myself have had such feelings, for it is a seemingly obvious episode of pure good versus pure evil.
Here we will…
The retro-futuristic art of Shusei Nagaoka
Japanese artist Shusei Nagaoka gained renown in the 1970s and 80s, when he illustrated album covers for artists like Earth, Wind & Fire, Electric Light Orchestra and Jefferson Starship.
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Our review of For All Mankind
The first time I gave For All Mankind a try was not long after I’d seen Altered Carbon, and another ten episodes of Joel Kinnaman’s pent-up anger was a little too much for me.
I still find it off-putting, and his character in For All Mankind shows almost no growth over two seasons. But the rest of the series makes up for it.
It starts with the Soviet Union beating the Americans to the Moon and…
From the imperial era to the global ambitions of totalitarian ideologies - a history of attempts to remake the world
It wasn’t until the modern era that would-be conquerors and do-gooders could think on a global scale. The discovery of the New World and the invention of steamboats, the telegraph, airplanes, television and intercontinental ballistic missiles made the world feel smaller. Egyptian pharaohs and Chinese emperors may have claimed to rule everything under the sun and the heavens; it wasn’t until the…
The atomic-era art of Arthur Radebaugh
Arthur Radebaugh (1906-74) was a prolific midcentury illustrator, perhaps best known for his “Can You Imagine” and “Closer Than We Think” series, which were syndicated in newspapers across the United States in the years after World War II. The usually one-panel comics predicted various future scenarios, some of which, like remote working and electronic home libraries, came true!
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Review of Free State of Jones
Much has been written about how much of the American South was complicit in the institution of slavery. Historian Ira Berlin wrote in Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (1998) that the South wasn’t just a “society with slaves”; it was a “slave society”. Chattel slavery was the institution around which life in those states revolved.
Slaves tried to break the chains…
All time travel authorities look the same
I finally watched Loki on Disney+ (it’s hilarious) and one of the things that stood out to me was the aesthetic of the show’s Time Variance Authority (TVA). Brutalist with a mix of midcentury graphics and 1970s decor, it reminded me of the Fallout video games as well as Counterpart, the most underrated science-fiction series of recent years. The Office of Interchange in that show also uses…
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