[DaleCoz]

As tired as people are of the World War II and Civil War alternate histories, I find with my newsletters that World War II stuff gets far more hits than anything else, especially eastern front stuff and anything that involves Pearl Harbor or the first few months of the Pacific War. Part of the problem is that the further you go from the big events everybody has heard of, the fewer people understand the real history enough to appreciate the alternatives.

That's especially true if you get away from wars, but even there you lose a lot of people if you go away from Civil War and World War II. I did a novella a while back where the Indians won King Phillip's War and found that almost nobody knew enough about the real King Phillips War to know where the divergences happened.

I was on a panel at Windycon a few years ago on why so few science fiction stories are set in Africa. I made the point that alternate history is very difficult there because so few people know the real history. Here's an example: I'm going to toss out some things about an African kingdom called Kongo. Challenge: without googling it, tell me which if any of the events I describe are alternate history:

1) Starting in 1491, the royal family of the Kongo, a powerful kingdom in what is now Northern Angola, converted to Catholicism. Many of their subjects followed suit. They were in contact with various popes over the next several hundred years and had a considerable church hierarchy.
2) For the next almost a century and a half, Kongo remained a regional power, interacting intriguing with and fighting for and against the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch.
3) In the 1660s, the Portuguese crushed Kongo in an epic and close-fought battle that was to that Kingdom as Mansikert was to the Byzantines. They killed the king and the core of his supporters, seized his treasury and triggered a decades long civil war. Some of the Portuguese forces were from Brazil, and they may have included Brazilian Indians allied to Portugal.
4) The remnants of the kingdom generated a "Joan of Arc"-type figure who tried to bring the kingdom back together, and was burned at the stake for her troubles.

Feel free to make your guesses as to what is alternate history and then scroll down.

All true. No alternate history involved.