Alternate Historian says, everyone at the Academy was thrilled to receive a smashing story from Mr Brian Brackney, sincerely. Brian's post takes a very well deserved place today - thank you, sir. Please email send your story to Alternate Historian and please remember to include the posting date you require.

In 1955, on this day budding film star James Dean died in a car accident. Dean anticipated the Goth fad by two generations. In East of Eden he played a young teenager who has a human father but a vampire mother who deserted him and his twin brother at birth. He exposes their vampire heritage to his twin who offers his services to the US Army during World War 1. His twin dies at the hands of a vampire in the German army, a young corporal named Adolph Hitler. In a Rebel Without a Cause Dean played a young teenager who redeems himself after a peer drives off a cliff in a deadly game of chicken. He along with Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood lead a daring raid on the lair of sea monster who conducts sinster experiments on teenagers. He reedems himself when he rescues his peer whom he thought dead along with others. In Giant he played a young man who struck it rich after space aliens reveal to him the location of oil fields. Today Dean is revered by young goths as an early forerunner of their subculture.

In 2026, the leader of the Fourth Expedition Captain Wilder introduced his children to the Martians by showing his family their reflections in the canal. The indigenes of Mars had died of chicken pox brought by the first three expeditions.

Columbus	"I believe that .. you will soon convert to our holy faith a multitude of people, acquiring large dominions and great riches for Spain." ~ Christopher Columbus, would-be architect of First Nation destruction on the Turtle Island.
Explorer

Writing to Ferdinand and Isabella, urging the Christianization of 'natives' in October 1492. Columbus and his men were unable to combat the melancholy of separation emanating from the Mesh, that irresistible group consciousness between First Nations linking the Turtle Island (America) to the Dreamtime (48,000 year old Aboriginal civilization). A synopsis of the life and times of Christopher Columbus is provided at Wikipedia

Omoro Kinte	In 1750, in Juffure on the Gambia, a village elder conducts an ancient Mandinka ritual, sending Omoro Kinte across the great river of time and space. On the same voyage are three others, Thalmus Rasulala, Cicely Tyson, LeVar Burton. The elder delivers this band of four young people to Annapolis, Maryland. Somehow they must release Alex Haley from bondage and return him to the year 1976, where he must must publish “Roots: The Saga of an American Family”. Haley is trying to give his people a myth to live by, overturning other myths about the Black American experience and giving African Americans a proud history. They must succeed.

In 1964, Hawthorn Abendsen published the counter-factual novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Set in America in 1962, the once-isolationist nation had been propelled to global domination as the world's first hyper power All because some twenty years earlier Japan has provoked America by going pre-emptive on the US Pacific Fleet at Hawaii. The essence of Dick's masterpiece is the book within the book, 'Man in the High Castle', a work of fiction written by a man called Philip K Dick. It describes a world where the Japanese won the Pacific war - as a result, it has been banned by the Americans. Given his unpopularity with the world's two great powers, Dick is said to live in a heavily fortified home and has become known as "The Man in the High Castle". Critics panned the concept but loved the story.	What If?
After all, it was predicated on the US Fleet leaving San Diego for Hawaii when Americans overwhelmingly disapproved of war in the Pacific. Today we know that Mr Roosevelt meant it when he said at Boston on October 30 1940: "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."

T.E. Lawrence	In 1946, on this day sentencing occurred at the Nuremberg Trials. A guilty charge was found against Commander of the British Eighth Army Colonel T.E. Lawrence and subordinates Bernard Law Montgomery, Archibald Percival Wavell and Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck and all four were shot the very next day. Granted a last request, Lawrence wrote a short letter for Winston Churchill who - along with the remnants of the British Royal Navy - had withdrawn to Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands. Thanking Churchill for his confidence in the Command appointment, Lawrence blamed his defeat upon a group of Egyptian officers, headed by Gamal Abdul Nassar, and Anwar el-Sadat, who secretly sided with the Germans, ridding North ..
.. Africa of Britain's presence. In a final, chilling paragraph, Lawrence entered a biblical quote from the Book of Proverbs, 9:1: Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars

In 1963, John F Kennedy was prescribed the stiff canvas shoulder-to-groin metal framed brace that would deflect an assassin's bullet at Dallas, saving his life less than seven weeks later. "Kennedy may have been saved . . . by his sexual excesses and compulsiveness," Hersh wrote in the Dark Side of Camelot "He severely tore a groin muscle while frolicking poolside with one of his sexual partners during a West Coast trip in the last week of September 1963. The pain was so intense that the White House medical staff prescribed a stiff canvas shoulder-to-groin metal framed brace that locked his body in a rigid upright position. It was far more constraining that his usual back brace, which he also continued to wear. The two braces were meant to keep him as comfortable as possible during the strenuous days of campaigning, including that day in Dallas.”	JFK