A Very Special Day Here At The Academy

The state of TIAH

February 20th, 2007

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Alternate Historian's Note: Our Guest Historian's entries yesterday got stuck in a temporary time loop, repeating the day before. Thankfully, we sorted that out with our trusty Loop-O-Matic, and his real post for yesterday is in place. Stephen also had a great suggestion – we haven't had a good contest in a while, 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. Now, on with a very special day for us here...

in 1968, folk singer-songwriter Cheryl Ann Vernon is born in Bryan, Texas. As a teenager, she began playing clubs in her home state as a backup singer to other acts. All the while, she was writing her own material and making the contacts necessary for her own breakthrough, which she did in 1989, landing a record deal with Warner Brothers for her debut album, Shilo. Although speculation was rife about the identity of the great love of her life in the album's title song, she settled the mystery in 1997, just before her marriage to author Robert A. Taylor, by telling a reporter from the Rolling Stone that Shilo was her cat. She even produced an album about it after her marriage, called CAT scratches, using her married name for the first time in the public eye.

in 1985, the Republic of Ireland knuckles under to pressure from the Catholic Church and kills a measure in Parliament that would have allowed the sale of contraceptives, in spite of a Supreme Court ruling in 1973 that the Irish constitution provided a right to privacy that allowed such sales. Several pharmacies worked outside of the law to provide contraception to at least married couples, and were covertly aided by the government until a conservative backlash placed staunch Catholics in charge in 1990. A very repressive law against any form of birth control passed the Parliament, and provided an impetus for feminists in Ireland to organize and campaign. They were so successful, and tapped such a huge groundswell of support, that they managed to cast out the conservative government in 1992 and finally implement the 20-year old Supreme Court decision.

Qumran	In 1947 the Palestinian shepherd Mohammed Ahmed el-Hamed found in eleven caves near Wadi Qumran the Dead Sea Scrolls comprising c850 documents including texts from the Hebrew Bible. Of great religious and historical significance, they are practically the only known surviving Biblical documents ..
.. written before AD 100. The State of Palestine used the scrolls as a key bargaining chip in the negotiation of the two states solution in 1982, when the documents were ceremoniously handed to Israeli Chairman Yitzhak Rabin by President Mahmoud Abbas in the Free City of Jerusalem.
~ entry by Steve Payne from counter history in context - you're the judge!

In 1969 a world wide catastrophe occurred on the date predicted by anti-pope Michel Collin as the undeclared war between United States, Russia and China in Vietnam escalated into a nuclear exchange.	Nuclear War
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

Seato	In 1976 the South-east Asia Collective Defense Treaty (SEATO) was disbanded. The defense considered necessary at the signing of the Manilla Pact in 1954 was no longer required. The success of President Douglas MacArthur's Second Pacific War had rendered the organization unnecessary as ..
.. friendly governments ruled the AsiaPac states by the mid-1970s.
~ entry by Steve Payne from counter history in context - you're the judge!

In 1992 promising to get under the hood and fix the engine, Ross Perot announced his intention to run in the 1992 U.S. presidential election on CNN's Larry King Live. When US votes found out the extent of incompetence and waste in Washington, they were simply shocked, and today Perot is ..	Ross Perot
.. recognised as the Father of Small Government in the United States.
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

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