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Notes -
For Want of a Nail:
The US loses the Battle of Saratoga. France and Spain develop no faith in the rebels' ability to win the war, and refuse to provide aid, so the US then loses the war. However, Britain recognizes its errors and reforms the US and Canada into a dominion-ish Confederation of North America.
With no extra debt from fighting Britain in the American Revolution, France does not collapse into revolution (though it comes close after losing a war to Prussia and Britain in 1799), and Louisiana remains under Spanish, and then Mexican, control.
The American rebels that have not been executed for treason emigrate to form the Republic of Jefferson (Texas fifty years early). In 1816, Jefferson (led by Andrew Jackson) intervenes in a Mexican civil war to form a United States of Mexico that later degenerates into dictatorship.
The CNA abolishes slavery in 1841, after an economic depression with roots in London bank failures causes the price of cotton to plummet, making owning slaves uneconomical.
Republicanism in Europe is crushed by the failure of the American rebels, and is not revived until 1879, when, after Louis XX abdicates in the face of advancing German troops, socialist rioters in Paris execute the royal family and, aided by defecting French troops, beat back the Germans. The ensuing continent-wide wave of republican/socialist spirit in 1880 (comparable to OTL's Springtime of Nations) overtakes all the major powers except Britain and Russia.
Russia collapses in 1900, after losing Alaska and eastern Siberia to the USM in a conflict analogous to OTL's Russo-Japanese War.
Et cetera. The book extends to year 1970. It is written in the style of a textbook, with hundreds of footnotes and fake citations.
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