Maximum Massachusetts

Before there was the Drowned Baby Timeline, there was . . . Maximum Massachusetts!

Back in the summer of 2000, the soc.history.what-if newsgroup was a bubbling cauldron of intellectual ferment. A thread on the topic of the Amboyna Massacre had given rise to Anthony Mayer's Sugar & Spice timeline, which in turn led Mayer to speculate on what might have happened if the British had handed Canada back to the French in 1763 in return for the lucrative sugar islands of Guadeloupe. Mayer pointed out that the British had done something similar when they handed back the Fortress of Louisbourg in 1748 after the English colonists had gone to a lot of trouble to conquer it. I responded that the same thing had happened fifty years before, when colonists from Massachusetts conquered Nova Scotia in 1690, only to see it handed back to the French in the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick. I happened to speculate on what might have happened if the Massachusetts colonists had refused to hand over Nova Scotia . . .

. . . and the result was the appearance, on August 15, 2000, of the first installment of Maximum Massachusetts, my very first multi-part alternate history scenario. Since my busy work schedule won't allow me time to write new material for this blog, I've decided that the next best thing is to post old material here. Thus, over the next few weeks, I'll be posting the complete Maximum Massachusetts timeline here. Stay tuned!

1. Point of Departure
2. Brothers in Arms
3. The Cotton Thread
4. Departures and Deductions
5. The Crow
6. The Devil You Know
7. The Vision
0. The Glorious Revolution
8. Dudley Do-Wrong
9. A Letter from America
10. The Battle of Breton
11. As the Crow Flies
12. The Great White Northern War
13. Trick or Treaty
14. Cotton Comes to Haarlem
15. The Devil You Don't Know
16. The Rich White Guy Insurrection
17. Adrift
18. Full Circle
Son of Maximum Massachusetts