The Secret Of Life

The state of TIAH

February 28th, 2007

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Alternate Historian's Note: Our Guest Historian, Stephen Payne, suggested that it was time for a contest, so we're going to have an April Fool's Day Contest! Email us up to 3 entries for an alternate April 1st and we will post the best 10, with your own credit and link to your website (if you have one). We'll also see if we have enough credit for an ultimate winner to get a complimentary TIAH mug, but we can't promise anything on that yet. Get researching those alternate histories now, folks! The deadline will be March 29th.

in 1844, President John Tyler, who had himself been raised to the presidency by the death of his predecessor William Harrison, is killed by the explosion of an experimental cannon aboard the USS Princeton. Tyler had no vice-president to succeed him, so the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Virginian John Winston Jones, assumed the high office. President Jones, who had been planning on retiring, found that the power of the presidency was quite intoxicating, and used the influence he had as the incumbent to secure the Democratic Party's nomination for the 1844 elections. He won against the Whig candidate, Senator Henry Clay, in a hotly contested and close election. His stridently pro-Southern policies rubbed the northern states the wrong way, and Henry Clay, although a Southerner himself, used this disaffection to hobble Jones' power. The conflict between them is widely attributed to the shortening of Jones' life, something Clay expressed little remorse over in later years. When President Jones died in 1847, his vice-president, James K. Polk, assumed office in the middle of a war with Mexico and widespread dissatisfaction with the government. Polk's mismanagement of the Mexican War led to a wave of secessions from states bordering Mexico, and the diminishment of the once-bright shining star of the US.

in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick announced to a pub crowd in Cambridge, England, that they had discovered the secret to life. Their drunken tales of strange shapes in the deoxyribonucleic acid that they claimed was the building blocks for all life on earth made for an entertaining evening to the pub crowd. After closing time, though, they stumbled into the street and were never heard from again. One of the scientists who had listened to them in the pub was curious as to why they disappeared, and looked into their offices at King's College a couple of days later. He found their bodies – they had each been shot through the head – and all of their research notes were gone. The police were baffled as to why this innocuous pair might be slain – they had no enemies who were that passionate about them. The scientist who had found them, William Hughes, thought that looking into the research they had bragged about might yield some results, but with their notes gone, the police were a little stymied in that area. Hughes began a private investigation of his own.

Oswald Mosley	In 1931 the New Party is founded in Great Britain by Oswald Mosley. The Axis powers of Anglo-America take a huge leap forward on the road to fascism.
~ entry by Steve Payne from counter history in context - you're the judge!

In 1900 the 118-day Siege of Ladysmith is lifted at a cost of 3,000 British deaths as Imperial Troops defeat the Boers and their German allies. The Kaiser cynically intervened in the Second Boer War to claim a share of the mineral wealth of South Africa for the Second Reich.	Irregular Boer ..
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

Anwar Sadat	In 1974 the United States and Egypt re-established diplomatic relations after eighteen years. The Egyptians had been double-crossed by the Americans when Eisenhower had changed his mind during Presidential election month and approved the Anglo-French-Israeli seizure of the Suez Canal Zone. ..
.. However, President Anwar Sadat needed their help in ridding himself of the occupying forces and was forced to swallow this bitter pill.
~ entry by Steve Payne from counter history in context - you're the judge!

In 2001 an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter Scale hit the Nisqually Valley and the Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia area of the U.S. state of Washington. Confederate President William Jefferson Clinton promised massive aid to his northern neighbour, as US/CS relations continued to thaw.	Bill Clinton
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

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