United States of America

The United States is a federal constitutional republic in North America.

United States in Curious Notions
In the alternate designated by Crosstime Traffic as "3477", the United States remained neutral during World War I, and watched helplessly as Germany subdued Europe, solidifying its rule by the late 1930s. In 1956, Germany attacked and defeated the United States with atomic bombs. The United States remained under German rule for the next 150 years.

United States in Days of Infamy
The United States had sought to remain neutral in the conflict that was quickly evolving into World War II. That ended in 1941, when, in response to Japan's aggression in China, the United States stopped selling oil and steel to Japan. Japan saw this as an act of aggression, as without these resources Japan's military machine would grind to a halt. In March, 1941, the Japanese government resolved to go to war with the United States. The first blow would be an attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, on the U.S. territory of Hawaii. However, at the insistence of Commander Minoru Genda and Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, that plan became an invasion of Hawaii.

The invasion began on December 7, 1941. U.S. forces, believing such an attack impossible while also presuming their inherent superiority, were surprised by the efficiency and skill Japanese forces demonstrated. The Japanese quickly gained dominance of the air and the sea, and U.S. ground forces were overwhelmed by the tenacity of the Japanese army. By February, 1942, U.S. forces surrendered.

For the remainder of 1942, U.S. policy was directed to regaining Hawaii, while also at war with Japan's ally, Germany. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to pursue a "Germany first" policy in the war, but the loss of Hawaii, followed by Japan's air raid on San Francisco, forced the U.S. to focus its attention on the Pacific.

The first response from the U.S. came in March, 1942, when Jimmy Doolittle led an air-raid on Oahu. In retaliation, Japanese bombers raided San Francisco, an act that futher humiliated the U.S.

In June, 1942, the United States sent a fleet of three aircraft carriers and assorted troopships and destroyers to retake the islands. The Japanese navy met the Americans, sinking two of the carriers (the Saratoga and the Yorktown) and forcing a retreat. Embarassed, the United States continued its production of aircraft carriers. It was able to hurt Japan's supply lines via submarines and harrassed the islands with bombing raides.

In the wake of the failed invasion, the U.S. concentrated on a realistic plan for invading Hawaii, assembling an overwhelming force. In 1943, the United States returned, with a massive fleet, comprised of some 7 aircraft carriers, 5 light carriers, close to a dozen escort carriers, several destroyers, and troop carriers. This invasion proved to be the end of Japanese rule in Hawaii, as the Japanese naval contingent was destroyed, and the Japanese supplyline, already taxed, was broken completely. American forces landed at Oahu, and after a period of bitter fighting, were able to subdue Japan's ground forces.

The United States turned its attention to Midway, which was still in Japanese control.

United States in The Guns of the South
In 1861, under President Abraham Lincoln, the United States became involved in a civil war when eleven slaveholding Southern states attempted to secede from the Union and form the Confederate States of America. Four years of warfare (what became known as the Second American Revolution) followed.

In 1864, the Confederacy's chances of victory were diminishing in the face several critical military defeats and the vast difference in industrial and human resources that favored the U.S. However, through the actions of a group of time-travelering members of the Afrikanerweerstandsbeweging, a racist South African organization, the South was saved. The Rivingon men (as they came to be called) supplied Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia with AK-47 automatic rifles. These futuristic weapons more than made up for the Confederacy's lack of resources.

After several weeks of training, the Army of Northern Virginia engaged the Federal military at Bealeton, Virginia. The Federals were completely surprised by the new "repeaters", and quickly collapsed. The ANV pressed on to Washington City, where President Abraham Lincoln had remained despite the encroaching enemy. When Lee and his army arrived, Lincoln invited the rebel commander into the White House to negotiate an armistice, ending major combat of the Second American Revolution. The United States licked its wounds. Lincoln was voted out of office, although he was able to secure reasonably good terms for peace. One conflict was the status of Kentucky and Missouri, two slave-states. Under a compromise, both were allowed to decide which country they would join in a plebiscite. Missouri remained part of the United States, while Kentucky joined the Confederate States.

The United States was able reverse engineer AK-47s captured from Confederate troops. These guns were put into mass production. Although not quite as reliable as the Confederate models, the guns were nonetheless successful. By 1867, the United States had launched a war with Britain and an invasion of Canada.

No one in the U.S. ever learned the true origin of the AK-47.

United States in In the Presence of Mine Enemies
The United States remained neutral during World War II. After the war, the United States found itself in a growing cold war with the victorious Axis, particularly the Greater German Reich and the Empire of Japan, climaxing with the Third World War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Germany was the first country to develop nuclear weapons, destroying  Washington, DC and Philadelphia during the fighting. While the U.S. was able to counter-attack German soil, it was subdued by its enemies. During the war, America lost a third of its population.

After the war ended, the Reich genocided the Jewish and Negro populations in the United States with large massacres taking place in New York City and Los Angeles. Segments of the white American population assisted in these massacres.

With Washington, DC reduced to a nuclear wasteland, the American capital was moved to Omaha in the Mid West where a pro-Nazi American administration was established. The US paid an annual tribute, which became an important source of income for the Reich's economy. When the United States was either unable to pay this tribute or was late doing, the Wehrmacht, which maintained bases in New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Omaha itself, used terror tactics to bring the U.S. in line.

The American economy underwent hyperinflation following the war with the US Dollar fallen from its place as a major world currency.

In 2010, as part of the reforms promised by the fourth Fuhrer Heinz Buckliger, Germany reduced the annual assessment by 13% (allowing the American economy to flow easier) and sent a division of occupation troops in the US back to the Reich (allowing the Americans to do more as they pleased with a lesser chance of being bullied and harassed by the occupation troops). Despite this, some Oberkommando der Wehrmacht officials like Heinrich Gimpel and Willi Dorsch assumed that the Americans would always try to find ways out of paying the annual tribute.

1861-1881
In 1861, under President Abraham Lincoln, the United States became involved in a civil war when eleven slaveholding Southern states attempted to secede from the Union and form the Confederate States of America. A year and a half of warfare (what became known as the War of Secession) followed.

In September 1862, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee defeated and destroyed US General George McClellan's Army of the Potomac at Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, then advanced on Philadelphia. President Lincoln, feeling the cause was lost and under pressure from Britain, signed a treaty recognizing the CSA's sovereignty.

Lincoln was voted out of office in 1864, and the Democratic Party won the next four Presidential elections. The Democrats, who before the war had favored Southern interests in the Federal government, took a soft line against the CS, and for the first twenty years that nation--and its ability to threaten the US--grew. It purchased Cuba from Spain in the 1870s.

1881-1914
In 1880, American voters, tired of the Democrats' soft line, elected Republican James G. Blaine President. In Blaine's first year in office, his Confederate counterpart, James Longstreet, purchased the states of Chihuahua and Sonora from Mexico, making the CS a transcontinental power by giving it access to the Pacific port city of Guaymas.

Blaine felt he could not tolerate this expansion, and went to war with the CS. The CS was supported by Britain and France. The US Army was disorganized and woefully underprepared for the war, and was easily defeated. The CS graciously offered the US status quo antebellum in everything but recognition of the Confederate claim to the two Mexican states. Britain, however, took half the state of Maine as a territorial concession and annexed it to the Dominion of Canada.

Following the war, the German military observer to the United States, Alfred von Schlieffen, recommended sweeping reorganizations to the US military to US General-in-Chief William Rosecrans. The military took these suggestions to heart, and Schleiffen, realizing the US's wealth of resources and antagonistic relationship with France could make it a potentially valuable ally, became along with German ambasador to the US Kurd von Schlozer, a voice in Berlin in favor of a US-German alliance--what ultimately became the Central Powers after German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck offered such an alliance to the US and the US accepted. (The alliance also included Austria-Hungary. For their part, the CS joined Britain, France, and Russia in forming the Entente.)

Over the next thirty years, Democrats dominated American politics, but with a much more nationalistic slant. The Republican Party, on the heels of the failures of both Lincoln and Blaine, had become largely defunct, and was soon eclipsed by the upstart Socialist Party as the Democrats' primary opposition.

The Democratic ideology was the U.S Nationalism known as "Remembrance." The US took to heart Schleiffen's suggestions for a military reorganization, replacing the position of General-in-Chief, which had limited supervision over largely autonomous field armies, with the centralized General Staff. However, the reforms did not stop there; all of US society was reorganized. Government became more bureacratic, life more regulated. Under hard-line presidents like Thomas Brackett Reed and Alfred Thayer Mahan, every facet of the country was fine-tuned to be able to support a war effort against the Entente. (It was during Reed's administration that a mutual defense pact was signed with Haiti, perceived as a rather aggressive mood, and that the US threatened war with the CS if it attempted to dig a canal through the Isthmus of Nicaragua.)

That war came in 1914 when Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. Alliance systems were invoked, and war spread across Europe--and North America. The Great War had begun.

1914-1917
Unlike in its previous two wars against the CS, the US did not allow its enemy to make early gains in the Great War, vigorously contesting the Confederate advance through Washington DC, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. The US invaded both the CS and the Dominion of Canada and held the line against both through several years of hard fighting on stationary fronts, also mounting a naval conquest of the British Sandwich Islands in the opening weeks of the war. US scientists and engineers, cooperating with their German counterparts, produced many new weapons and innovations, including poison gas and barrels, though these two were quickly aped by the US's enemies.

The US supported the Red Rebellion in the Confederacy in 1915, forcing the CS to take men off the line to suppress the rebellion--though the US was forced to do the same to contain the perenially rebellious Mormons.

In 1916, US superiority in numbers and resources began to tell, and they were able to push their enemies back. They made significant inroads into the Canadian province of Quebec, and President Theodore Roosevelt decided to take advantage of Quebecois disaffection with their Anglophone neighbors stemming from religious and linguistic differences and create the Republic of Quebec.

Finally, in 1917, the US achieved a breakthrough. The first came in Tennessee, where General George Armstrong Custer ordered the Barrel Roll Offensive, in violation of General Staff doctrine. After that, Confederate armies collapsed throughout the country, and soon British and Canadian armies did, too. At the cost of 1.5 million KIA, the US had at long last achieved its great victory.

1917-1941
With an eye toward preventing the Entente from threatening the US again in the future, Roosevelt forced the defeated British to yield all claim to Canada and allow it to be occupied by US forces. He also demanded large indemnities and severe arms restrictions from the CS and the concession of the states of Kentucky, Sequoyah, and Houston. He placed the state of Utah under martial law.

However, with the long-sought after victory attained, Americans began looking more toward domestic policies than foreign. (One unfortunate manifestation of this shift in public opinion was that the US backed down from its protest of Turkey's genocide against the Armenians when Germany supported Turkey.) The years immediately following the Great War were marked by severe labor unrest, and in 1920, when Roosevelt ran for reelection to an unprecedented third term, he lost to Socialist Upton Sinclair.

Sinclair's first term was a time of peace and prosperity for the US, and he was reelected in 1924. The good times continued through his second term. However, in 1928, Sinclair's Vice President, Hosea Blackford, was elected (having defeated the once-popular Roosevelt Sinclair was wary of violating the two-term precedent) and within a year the stock markect collapsed and the US economy plumetted. The Blackford Administration was further embattled when Japan attacked the US, beginning the Pacific War. Though the war was a draw and was not particularly costly for the US, the Japanese managed to raid Los Angeles while Blackford was appearing there at a campaign function. Blackford was defeated in 1932 by Calvin Coolidge, who died before taking office; his term was served by Herbert Hoover. Hoover fared no better than Blackford in sparking economic recovery (though he did manage to conclude the Pacific War), and was himself defeated by Socialist Al Smith in 1936.

Throughout this period, the US had paid less attention to the defeated CS. Sinclair had forgiven the war indemnities after the assassination of Wade Hampton V, and the US stopped sending weapons inspectors to enforce compliance with the arms restrictions shortly thereafter. When Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party was elected President of the CS in 1933, he secretly rearmed.

Featherston encouraged civil unrest among former Confederates in Kentucky, Houston, and, to a lesser extent, Sequoyah, and also supported insurgents in Utah. Smith ended martial law in Utah as an attempt to appease the latter group, and met with Featherston in Richmond to discuss a solution for the three former Confederate states. Featherston clearly got the better of Smith at this meeting, convincing the US President to agree to plebiscites in the three states and agreeing that, whichever country won, the states would remain demilitarized for twenty-five years--a promise he had no intention of keeping.

Through Freedomite intimidation tactics, the US lost the plebiscites in Kentucky and Houston, and Featherston immediately stationed troops in these states upon retaking possession of them. Featherston then issued an ultimatum claiming the US had fixed the Sequoyah plebiscite and demanding the return of that state as well as several other small territorial concessions made at the end of the Great War. The US refused and was invaded on June 22, 1941 when Featherston launched Operation Blackbeard without issuing a formal declaration of war.

1941-1943
The US was unprepared for the Confederate invasion and was driven back quickly in the first months of the war. Confederate forces took Sandusky, Ohio, on Lake Erie and neatly bisected the US, cutting every transcontinental supply line not involving Canada.

The front stabilized when the Confederates reached Sandusky, and the US launched a counterattack in Virginia; however, the Confederates very effectively ground this assault to a halt north of Fredericksburg. US commander Daniel MacArthur launced two ill-advised assaults on that city known as the Battles of Fredericksburg. After the second such assault, the Virginia front essentiallly became a stalemate.

Early in 1942, President Smith was killed in an air raid on Philadelphia. Charles LaFollette became President.

The US sent supporting columns to open secondary fronts all along the border to counteract the Confederate advantage of interior lines of communication. This was effective in severely taxing CS Army personnel, but the Confederate column in Ohio launched Operation Coalscuttle into Pennsylvania late in 1942. The army pushed the US back into Pittsburgh, where it was destroyed in an enormous months-long battle.

Following the destruction of the Army of Kentucky, US General Irving Morrell followed up with a campaign to liberate Ohio and push through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia, with his ultimate objective being Atlanta. By the fall of 1943, his forces had nearly reached that city. Their fighter-bombers had gained air superiority over the Confederates, their paratroopers were threatening the flanks and rears of Confederate positions, and their barrels were superior to the enemy's.

Also in that year, the US Eleventh Army under General Abner Dowling retook Houston and took Camp Determination in Texas. The U.S. Navy won a decisive victory over the British in the Battle of the North Atlantic and retook Bermuda. Japan disengaged from US forces and attacked Britain's Asian colonies.

However, Philadelphia came under fire from Confederate rockets that fall.

The US supported guerrilla fighters within the CS recruited from among the black population, which was the target of a genocide by the racist Featherston. The CS supported yet another Mormon rebellion in Utah, and Britain--still a nominal enemy despite both the Entente and the Central Powers being much looser in terms of intercontinental cooperation than was true in the Great War--supported a Canadian uprising. In 1942, that uprising expelled a Quebecois garrison from the city of Winnipeg. The US was also engaged in a war against Japan; it defended the Sandwich Islands, a Great War territorial gain, against that nation and retook Midway and Wake Island. This war ended in 1943.

In Hanford, Washington, US physicists began a top-secret project to build a superbomb.

United States in A World of Difference
The United States was one of two countries to send a manned ship to the planet Minerva. The other was its rival, the Soviet Union. Following the death of Frank Marquard, the US reluctantly supported the Omalo in the Skarmer-Omalo War. The Omalo emerged victorious, and the US developed very warm relations with Reatur, who suddenly found himself an extremely powerful domain-master.

1942-1945
On December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked the United States base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, drawing the US into World War II on the side of the Allied Forces. Less than six months later, the Race's Conquest Fleet invaded Earth, and that war was abandoned as every human nation was thrown into a fight for its survival.

The US military fared badly in the first year of the war, with Race forces taking pockets of territory throughout the Midwest and the destruction of its capital, Washington, DC by one of the Race's nuclear missiles. In the winter of 1942-43, however, US generals George Patton and Omar Bradley, taking advantage of the Race's low tolerance for cold temperatures, launched a counterattack during a snowstorm that prevented the Race from taking the city of Chicago.

The US became a participant in the Big Five cobelligerency along with Germany, Japan, Britain and the Soviet Union. It benefited from technology exchanges among the group, and received a sample of radioactive uranium from the Polish Jew Mordechai Anielewicz.

The US completed an atomic bomb in late 1943 and destroyed the city of Chicago, which the Race was on the verge of taking. It also destroyed the Race-held city of Miami. The Race retaliated by destroying Seattle and Pearl Harbor; Vice President Henry Wallace was killed in the former.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1944 and was succeeded by Secretary of State Cordell Hull. It was Hull who accepted the Race's invitation to be part of the Peace of Cairo and sent his Secretary of State, General George Marshall, to represent US interests at the conference. Along with its Big Five cobelligerents, the US was among the first political entity to force an authority of the Ssumaz dynasty to treat with it on equal terms in more than fifty thousand years.

1945-1962
Peace prevailed on Earth, however unsteadily, and the US, like Germany and the Soviet Union (and Japan and Britain to a much lesser extent) took advantage of this peace to build up its technological arsenal. The US built nuclear missiles, computers, created its own Internet, and became a space-faring government: It maintained a space station in Earth orbit, flew regular orbital flights, and visited the Moon and Mars.

1962-1966
In 1962 the Race's Colonization Fleet arrived in Earth orbit. It was attacked by the nuclear missiles of an unknown party, and twelve of its starships were destroyed. The attack had been ordered by none other than US President Earl Warren, but this would not come to light for several years.

In 1963 the US completed the Lewis and Clark, a space vessel which it sent to the asteroid belt. This was the first spaceship of human build to use an atomic engine and was considered a forerunner of a starship with interstellar capability.

The US allowed the Race to set up shrines to the spirits of emperors past within its territory, making it unique among the human powers. The US believed it could not bar the shrines under the Free Exercise clause of its Constitution. The Race's cult of emperor-worship was adopted by some Americans, mainly Californians.

The US remained neutral in the war between Germany and the Race, but Warren took note of the destruction to which Germany was subjected. U.S. offers to broker a peace were rejected.

When Straha, an exiled Conquest Fleet shiplord who had defected to the US in 1944, brought incriminating evidence of US involvement in the Colonization Fleet episode provided to him by his friend, Sam Yeager, to the attention of Atvar, the US was presented with a choice: allow the Race to destroy an American city; discontinue its space program; or go to war. Warren knew that, even with Soviet help, the US could not win a war, and also knew that the dismantling of the space program would be an unacceptable setback. Warren therefore allowed the Race to destroy Indianapolis, then committed suicide and was succeeded by his Vice President, Harold Stassen.

1966-2031
As ginger use became widespread among the Colonization Fleet's females, causing them to become sexually receptive all the time, many who frequently mated with male friends became interested in entering into exclusive mating arrangements, or marriages. As the Race considered monogamy the height of perversion, these couples were not welcome in their own government's territory. The United States accepted many monogamous Lizards as defectors, thus deepening their own talent pool and simultaneously depleting the Race's.

In the late 1970s the US began experimenting with cold sleep technology. A number of people it considered useful (and, not coincidentally, troublesome) such as Sam Yeager and Glenn Johnson were put into suspended animation in preparation for an interstellar journey to Home at sublight speeds. The US launched its starship, the Admiral Peary, in 1997. It arrived in Home orbit in 2031, the first starship not of Race manufacture to visit Home in that planet's history.

The Admiral Peary was sent with the primary mission of establishing an embassy on Home. It had originally intended for Dr Henry Kissinger to be diplomatic chief of mission, but he failed to awaken from cold sleep and Sam Yeager became ambassador.

Yeager and his team dealt primarily with Atvar, Race psychologist Ttomalss, and Tosevite citizen of the Empire Kassquit. Yeager was also granted an audience with Emperor Risson, making him the first ambassador to be received by a Ssumaz emperor since the unification of Home.

Despite a willingness to negotiate in good faith by both parties, the Race could not accept the threat presented to it by the US's presence in the Tau Ceti system. The tone of the negotiations steadily deteriorated over a period of several months, and war seemed increasingly likely. Then the FTL ship Commodore Perry arrived in Home orbit, a clear sign that the United States had surpassed the slow-moving Race technologically--thus giving the US the very real option of destroying the Race's entire empire if the Race attempted to destroy the United States and Earth. Under an unprecedented threat, the Race sought to reach a peaceful understanding with the US.

United States in "Elder Skelter"
The United States was in the throws of a generational crisis as Boomers retained the reigns of government in the face of Generation Xers and Wires. The Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the Constitution had been passed, which called for a balanced budget and restrained entitlement programs.

When Quebec invaded the Maritimes, the Maritimes called on the US to arbitrate a cease-fire and send peace-keepers. In a cabinet meeting, the president reazlied that the Twenty-Eighth Amendment limited her use of peace-keepers. She was also confronted by the generational anxiety of her younger cabinet members. The situation was made more difficult by the possibility that Quebec might next turn its attention to Maine if it wasn't stopped in the Maritimes.

United States in "Joe Steele"
The United States history of representative government came to an end upon the election of California congressman Joe Steele to the presidency. Steele quickly assumed greater power for the executive, colluding with J. Edgar Hoover to break the Supreme Court, purge the military, and keep the American people in a state of terror.

Although Steele guided the country through World War II and the Japanese War, his unprecedented 6 elections and assumption of absolute power broke the institutions of democracy. Upon Steele's death, Hoover assumed the presidency, and began a reign even more tyrannical than Steele's.

United States in "Must and Shall"
The United States survived the Great Rebellion of 1861-1865, and the Southern Confederate states were kept in the Union. However, the United States government imposed a harsh and repressive peace upon the rebellious states. In 1942, the federal government stopped a Nazi-backed uprising. Many of the freedoms the Loyal States took for granted were denied the Southern states.

United States in "News From the Front"
The United States was sharply divided after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Almost immediately, the American press unleased a continuace stream of criticism of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's handling of World War II, often releasing strategic secrets in their efforts to demonstrate the president's incompetence. As his poll numbers fell, Roosevelt's position grew more vulnerable, and his honesty was called into question. By June, 1942, Roosevelt was on the verge becoming the second president ever impeached.