Oh, uh, waiter. Yes, sir? I'll have some sliced chicken, some potato salad, and a bottle of cold, perhaps blue ribbon. Yes, sir. Finest beer served anywhere. From Hollywood, perhaps blue ribbon. Finest beer served anywhere. Proudly present. Green Directors Playhouse, production Yellow Sky, director William Wellman, star Gregory Pag. Hollywood Screen Directors present a story written in the Western Sands. The popular motion picture Yellow Sky starring Gregory Peck and introduced by the director of the film, Mr. William Wellman. Our guest screen director tonight has created more than individual motion pictures. He has created entertainment for a generation, bringing scores of hours of adventure and drama to the screen, as the director of such memorable pictures as Wings, A Star is Born, The Story of G.I. Joe, The Oxpo Incident, and tonight's adventure, Yellow Sky. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. William Wellman. A century ago, the frontiers of the West sounded as siren called to men who were strong and tough and ambitious. And sometimes they were lawless with a swaggering contempt for justice. Today, the frontier still sounds its call to adventure in the tales of its time and people. We heard that call when we filmed tonight's story. Now here it is for the first time on the air, Yellow Sky, starring Gregory Peck in his original role of stretch. In the flat pan of the desert, the ghost town of Yellow Sky hugs the seared brown dust, sinking it into its own barren loneliness to escape the sun. In the deserted quiet, nothing lives. Nothing stirs until... Grandpa! Grandpa! There's men coming! Five men coming across the desert! I can't... I can't go on. Keep going. Bull Run's right. First of use is nothing but desert. No water for two days, but horse is useless. Keep going. There's an end to this sand somewhere. You find it for a stretch. You got us out of here. Hold on. Stop. Now listen to me. Dude, lengthy. Bull Run. Warress. Nobody forced you to come. You've stayed near the side of this desert. Let the army troops hang you for bank robbers. Maybe it would have been better than this. Then maybe you should have stayed, lengthy. You're the boss, Stretch. You're the leader. This was your idea. That's right, dude. Now come on. Stretch! Up there on the rise. Look behind you. There's nothing but sand. I saw her all right. A woman with a rifle. Top that rise. Bull Run's going crazy. Now he ain't all that crazy, not yet. I'm having a look up there. Look at lengthy. Wetting his lips and nothing to run him with. Just thinking about that woman. Lengthy's a ladies' man, Warress. May I'm a gambler.  Money, water, or woman. Ain't that right, lengthy? Oh, he ain't so tough. Someday I'm gonna... Oh, no, you won't, lengthy. Stretch is smart and you're not.  Yeah? What about you, dude? That's different. I'm smart. Maybe smarter. Look, Stretch is waving at us. Come on. There's a town. You sure picked a good one, Stretch. A dead one, a ghost town. Water. There ain't no water.  There's a sign. Yellow sky. Fastest girl in town in the territory. It's a fitting place to die, isn't it?  Well, keep going, Stretch. There she is, the girl. I'll put up your gun. We don't mean no harm. Where'd you come from? Across the sink. We need water. Bad. What are you running away from? We want water, ma'am. Not talk. Well, there's a spring here between those two buildings. You hear that? There's water. Water. Come on, Bull Run.   Go on, Drink. But stay away from my house. I told you to stay away from here. I just wanted to pay you a friendly visit. Thank you and your grandpa for the grub. You would have taken it anyway. That's right. Yeah, we're used to taking what we want. Now, why do you always have to be toting that rifle around? I don't trust you. Well, you can trust me, but them others. They're talking about you. Saying how pretty you are. Wouldn't trust them. Animals.  Well, at length, he's gonna come prowling around.  You get out of here.  I don't like women who act so high and mighty. I think I better take that toy away from me.  Well, now I wouldn't go stirring up no trouble with that girl. Ha, ha, ha. Oh, that's quite a punch she's got there. Come in mighty handy when she gets married. Ha, ha. Oh, Mike's as tough as a pine nut. I ought to know I'm a grandpa. Mike, huh? Well, you're taller good. Yeah, me and the Apaches. Apaches. Oh, fine people, supposing you understand them. Any of them around here? Oh, from time to time.  If you and your friends need anything else before you hit the trail, you come and tell me. Yeah, sure we will. They've seen you. Grandpa, what did you treat them so nice for? I know what I'm doing. Fight them and right away they get suspicious.  Get the horses. We're pushing on. I said move. We're leaving. Dude's got other ideas. What kind of ideas? Gold. Here? You're crazy. It doesn't make sense. The old man and the girl living here alone. I've been looking around. Found half a dozen cradles and a big sluice box down there in the canyon. That's abandoned junk just like everything else around here. There's a shack there, too. Patchy's been living in it and I could smell them. Stronger than Fox's, Den. There's too much money laying around in banks for us to be worrying about any little dab these people got. Maybe it ain't so little. That's for me to decide. Dude's doing some deciding too, Stretch. You figure you're the boss now, dude? Personally, I don't care whose boss. As long as we get that gold. That's the way we all feel. All right. Supposing they got gold. I'm the one that's saying how we'll get it. Now you're talking. Maybe I ought to have a little talk with a girl alone.  We don't want no trouble like that. Oh, that ain't no trouble. I'm warning you all of you. Leave the girl alone. Now let's see about that gold.  Well, somehow we wouldn't believe you, Grandpa. Thieves. I should have shot you when you came. Soon, I guess you'd be twisting my arm. Well, I don't want that. I might as well tell you.  Yellow sky was a silver town. Silver peated out. Mike and me, we figured there might be gold. Moved in when the others left. And we struck it all right. Where is it? Gold's a mighty dangerous thing when you want it just for greed. We was going to reopen the town with it. Oh, we ain't so greedy. We'll make a deal. Supposing there's enough for all of us. Now what kind of a deal was you figuring on? 50-50. We'll split. Well, that sounds fair enough. Seeing as how things are. How much? How much is there? Counting to dust, about 50,000 maybe. 50,000? Grandpa, I don't tell him no more. Where is it? Casting the mouth of that old silver mine on the hill. When we seen you coming, we knocked out a few of the timbers. It's buried now. You'll have to dig for it.  You made a right good deal. You stay away from me. Oh, now, is that any way to talk to a man who's been digging hard for gold all day? Are lots of girls would be glad to have Link to come calling? Leave me alone. I'm going in the house. Not yet, you need. You're staying with me for a while. Not good, leave her alone. You just need used to men. Link, leave her go. You don't own me, Stretch. I got a right to come call. I said leave her go. Ah, she's worth nothing anyways. I told you no one was to bother the girl and keep your hands away from that gun. I wasn't. I know you wasn't. Now get out of here. All right, Stretch. This time. You all right? I guess so. Thanks. Oh, wait a minute. Where are you going? Inside with Grandpa. He's worried sick. About what? Running off with all the gold and leaving us nothing. I gave him my word, didn't I? I made a deal. The word of an outlaw? Look, I come from good people. Maybe I ain't no angel. Seems like I always been chasing or being chased. Now that's the only way I know. Brought up on the frontier, my ma was killed by Indians. My old man shot down in a gun fight. They'd be real proud of you, wouldn't they? All I know is they taught me to stick by my word and I'm sticking to our deal. I swear that on my ma's memory. Maybe you're telling the truth. Or before you go in. No. Now you're just like the other one. Let me go. Now you can go. If you want. I... Say. You kind of enjoying it. I shouldn't have let you touch me. I shouldn't have... Stretch? Dude. What are you doing here? Just looking. That's going to a lot of trouble, isn't it? All that swearing and promising just to get one female. She believes me.  Come on. We got a lot more digging to do tomorrow. The screen directors play house production of Yellow Sky starring Gregory Peck with Gloria Blondell and introduced by the director of the film Mr. William Wellman. Our in Chicago. The elevated trains are roaring overhead. You collar soggy and shirt sticking to your back. Step out under the boiling pavement. Underfoot the hot tar bends like rubber. What a scorcher and no relief in sight. Wait a minute. What's that little blue sign in the window? Oh brother. Perhaps blue ribbon. Finest beer served anywhere. Yes, during these hot July days, you're just one of millions of men all over America to whom that perhaps blue ribbon sign means welcome relief. Or perhaps blue ribbon does something more than quench your thirst. It gives you taste. Blue ribbon taste. The kind of taste you can't get anywhere else in the world except in that perhaps blue ribbon bottle. And fortunately, you can get that blue ribbon bottle all over the world. Yes, you hear it everywhere in Chicago and Cheyenne and Charlestown and Chattanooga. Perhaps blue ribbon. Finest beer served anywhere. Your taste will tell you why. Now back to our screen directors production of Yellow Sky starring Gregory Peck. Them shovels ain't for leaning. Now the sun don't help man. Don't know his dickens worth it. Now we get this gold walrus. We won't have to work no more. Oh wait, I almost got the mouth of the mind clear. Maybe they're lying to us. Maybe they're in no gold here. They ain't lying. We made a deal. That's a laugh. Us giving them a 50-50 split. Where's dude? That's what I'd like to know. Us working our guts out. He ain't no hand at working. He's nosing around town somewhere. We got this bull dip right out the rest of the dirt out of fall away. Come on. Gracious shovel's under. All right, here. Now. Cheyenne. She's open now. Come on, let's get that gold. Here it is. We got it. Sacks of it. Stretch. Sacks of gold. Come out of there. Come out of the mine. Look at it shine. I said come out of there. What's the matter with you? You think you wasn't interested in gold? Look. Look what's coming. Oh, it's just a sandstorm. No wind blown. Listen. Them horses. Holy Moses, the patches. That's what it looks like. They're heading for town. Well, I guess the old man ain't as loony as we figured. Oh, that sneakin' girl. Parony old Buzzard said the Apaches was friends of theirs. There must be about 40 or 50 of them. Where you reckon dudes at? He's probably hiding out in town. I aim to find out what's up. It's almost sundown. As soon as it's dark, I'm sneaking into town. What about us? Well, these rocks around the mouth of the cave make a good natural fort. Just don't go wandering around. Stretch must be right in the middle of them Apache devils by now. Look at their fires. Must be camp with the springs. What's that? Something's crawling over there. Don't shoot. It's me, dude. What's the idea of scaring us half to death? I've been down in yellow sky. Where's Stretch? In the town, seeing what he can find out. Oh, is that what he told you? You simple fools. Can't you see he sold you out? Stretch wouldn't do a thing like that. Suppose I told you Stretch and the girl were putting their heads together last night. Talking, planning. Him and the girl, huh? Yeah, Stretch wants that gold and he's not splitting in any more ways than he has to. I ain't worried about the gold so much as I'm worried about my hide. Then if you want to live walrus, you better move up on the ridge with me.  How does dude know? How does he know what Stretch is doing? Stretch is down in the town, isn't he? Figure it out for yourselves. Stretch! You got a surprise visitor. Quite a powwow going on out there. Apaches, they're our friends. All right, turn them loose on us. Some of your great friends are gonna get killed too. You'd think we'd turn the Apaches loose on you? On our own people? You're sent for them, didn't you? The truth is we didn't know their engines were within 50 miles of here. Now what are they doing in yellow sky? Well, it seems they've been having some sort of trouble back on the reservation and was out to kill.  Well, what about us? I told them you was working for me. You can't understand that, can you? Why did he tell them that? Because my grandfather wants to keep a lot of people from being killed, even people like you. Oh. Well, is it... is it all right if I wait here until daylight? Yes, you can wait. They'll be gone by morning. Then you can go back and steal our gold.  I'm sorry about last night. I'm ashamed of myself. What are you fellas doing up here in the ridge? I told you to wait at the mine. I know, but don't hear... I'm still giving the orders, not due. We'll talk about that later. What about the Indians? They're gone. The old man told them to move out. For good? For good. Then I think we better load up and start moving. First, I want to get one thing straight. Our deal with the old man. Well, what about it? The old man played square. Sent those apaches back to the reservation if he hadn't. We all be laying around now making bones. So? So whether you like it or not, we're going to give them their share, like we promised. Look, Stretch, we've been friends. Why can't we talk it over? Like this!  He's rolling down the hill. No, he ain't got him. Just winged him. He's stuck behind that rock. Well, he can't stay there forever. We'll get him when he runs for cover. That'll keep him down while we flank him. Get down! That ain't Stretch's gun. That's the girl. Stretch, come on down. I'll keep you covered. That little rattlesnake. When this is over, I'm going to take care of her all by myself. He's getting away. He'll head for the house. Then why don't we just load up and get out? Yeah, and spend the rest of our days waiting for Stretch to stick a gun in our backs. Lengthy's right. When we leave yellow sky, we won't be worrying about meeting up with Stretch again. See anything from the back window, Mike? Nothing. Nothing on this side. It's been dark for nearly two hours. They'll be coming soon. Yeah, it's mighty quiet out there. Maybe they left. A dude might want to leave. He's just gold-crazy. But lengthy, he's got other things on his mind. Mike? Yeah, Mike. Here they are. That's Dude. We don't want your gunning for us the rest of our lives, Stretch. We know if we have a shootout, some of us are going to get hurt. So we'll do what you wanted. We'll split with the girl and the old man. Hand me that great blanket over there. Here it is. Now, this just rolls up about the size of a man. Keep back. I'm going to open the door. Stretch, don't. Keep your eye peeled and shoot for the gun flashes. That suits me, Dude. Hold your fire. I'm coming out. That sure is one shot-up blanket. Hey, Dude. It's at the door. It was a certain target. Good work, lengthy. Where are you? I can't see you. Over here. What's happening out there? That sounds like Dude took a shot at Lengthy. What do you want? Bleeding something awful. Tell him to come in. Bring him in and come slowly. Stretch. We thought Lengthy got you. Not this time. Put him down. Here. Stretch up. Don't hurt Stretch. I'm sorry, kid. Always what's happening out there? Yeah, they think they killed you. Then, Dude, he took a shot at Lengthy. Guess he figured Lengthy might want too much of the gold, but he only winged him. Where are they now? Dude lit out for the barn where we left the gold. And Lengthy? Following him. Stretch, where are you going? Out to the barn. I don't want Lengthy and Dude killing each other. That's a pleasure I'm saving for myself. Don't stretch, you can't. There's two of them. Leave them go, Mike. Right now, you've got a patient to tend to. Oh, man. Stretch, he wanted to split with you. Dude wanted it all. We listened to Dude. You shouldn't talk. Don't make no difference now. He said he came from good folks. Proud of it. I guess he ain't really bad. Not like the others. He ain't listening, ma'am. If I didn't know better, I'd say you was kind of concerned. Are you all right? Yeah, I'm all right. They ain't. Here. Take this. It's your gun. I'm through with it, Mike. Through? Well, what goods are gunning Yellow Sky, there ain't nothing left to shoot. You... You're gonna stay? If you and Grandpa let me. Yeah, Grandpa. Hot up the coffee. We're coming in. You have just heard the last act of Yellow Sky. In a moment, our star, Gregory Peck, and our screen director, William Wellman, will return to the microphone. Hollywood is supposed to be a town of tinsel and glamour, but all that chee-chee you read about is nothing but a publicity front. Actually, most of the movie stars are home-loving folks just like you and me, who get their greatest pleasures from simple things. Sitting in the backyard with friends and neighbors, cooking hamburgers on a charcoal grill, serving cold bottles of perhaps blue-ribbon beer, everything in perfect taste. Blue-ribbon taste. And it's that blue-ribbon taste that makes this internationally famous beer so popular here in Hollywood and all over America. Yes, you hear it everywhere. In Boston's famous seafood restaurants, in Minnesota's beautiful lakeside resorts, in Ohio's friendly roadside inns, perhaps blue-ribbon. Finest beer served anywhere. Your taste will tell you why. Next week on Screen Directors Playhouse, perhaps blue-ribbon beer presents for the first time on the air Kazba, starring Tony Martin and Marta Toren. And now, here again is the star of tonight's play, Gregory Peck. Thanks very much. But the actual star of the Screen Directors Playhouse is the director himself. So here's the man who was really responsible for putting yellow sky on the screen, director Bill Wellman. Thanks, Craig. It's always a thrill for a director to hear his picture turned into radio fair. But tonight's broadcast of Yellow Sky was more than an exciting experience. It brought back some scorching memories. I mean those blazing days on location under a sun that was fine for movies, but awfully uncomfortable for movie makers. So if, for a few minutes, my temperature zoomed, it's because of a grand performance by Gregory Peck and an excellent cast. Thank you and good night. And good night to you, William Wellman and Gregory Peck.  An imaginary blue ribbon, of course. Just to remind you that tomorrow is the beginning of another glorious weekend. Two whole days to relax. Don't forget to buy a good supply of perhaps blue-ribbon beer. Finest beer served anywhere. Your taste will tell you why. Yellow Sky was presented through the courtesy of 20th Century Fox, shortly releasing Slattery's Hurricanes, starring Linda Darnell and Richard Widmark, and Your My Everything, starring Anne Baxter and Dan Daly. Screen director William Wellman's latest picture is the MGM production Battleground. Included in tonight's cast were Gloria Blondell as Mike, with Paul Freese, Jack Edwards, Wally Mayer, Ken Christie, Sam Edwards, and Dan Riss. Yellow Sky, based on the novel by W.R. Burnett, was adapted for radio by Richard Allen Simmons. And original music was composed and conducted by Henry Russell. Screen director's Playhouse was produced by Howard Wiley with dramatic direction by Bill Karn. The portions of the program were transcribed. Listen again next week when PAPST Blue Ribbon Beer presents Screen director's Playhouse, production, Casbah, director, John Berry, stars, Tony Martin, Marta Toran. Screen director's Playhouse is brought to you by the PAPST Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Peoria, Illinois, and New York, New Jersey. And sent you away with the best wishes of the PAPST Blue Ribbon Dealers from coast to coast. James Wallington speaking. This is NBC, the national broadcasting company.


Hi guys. So this is me from my phone.  So if you've been following me on social media, you know, I've been having some computer issues, not hardware issues, 99.9% sure software issues. And while most of the glitches now have been fixed, I did have to as part of the process update my operating system on my Mac desktop, which of course created a cascade effect of having to update a whole bunch of other things, which Monday afternoon I'm still in the process of doing. I don't even know when I'm going to get the vlog edited. It might be a little bit late, hopefully not, but we don't know. Anyway, I probably won't be going live this week, at least not on Tuesday at 10am pacific time like I usually do. I may do a test live to test out the new software, the new system, make sure everything's copacetic, you know? So I would say if you're not subscribed, please do make sure if you're subscribed, hit that little bell icon so you're notified when I do go live. And yeah, cross your fingers. Let's hope everything goes smoothly. Don't forget to stay safe, stay healthy, stay creative, and I'll see you when I see you. Go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye, guys.


Harry Turtle Love's Southern Victory series, a.k.a. Timeline 191, is one of the longest and most extensive works of alternate history ever written. It explores a world where the Confederate states won the American Civil War and covers over 80 years of history from 1862 all the way up to 1944. The series consists of 11 books in total, which are further split up into four different series. How If You Remain, The Great War Trilogy, The American Empire Trilogy, and The Settling Accounts Tetrology. It's a really long series, and probably my favorite example of the alternate history genre. I might even review it one day. While this setting does parallel some aspects of our real-life timelines, such as the rise of fascism and the world wars, the world is completely different from our own. On the macro level, there are entire countries and political movements that never come into existence. And on the micro level, there are some subtle shifts in American society, like government rationing and suppression of civil rights. Each of these books is pretty long and covers multiple years of history, so I'll just have to go over everything in order. And since this is alternate history, it doesn't involve any sort of magic or fantastical technology that I can examine and poke holes in. So instead, I'm going to be looking at all the changes to history and figuring out how plausible they are. However, when it comes to alternate history, it's impossible to definitively say what would have happened if something changed. So I'm going to be giving all of these changes one of four rankings. Likely, if the change would probably happen given the previous alterations to the timeline. Possible, if the change is totally possible, but far from a guarantee. Unlikely, if the change would probably not happen but is still possible. And impossible, if the change would never happen in a million years. And it should be noted that while all of these conclusions are based on real history, they are just my interpretations and opinions. If you have disagreements, feel free to voice them. Just make sure that you have actual evidence and arguments behind them. I'm not a historian, I'm just a guy that likes to study history. It's entirely possible that I missed or misunderstood something. It should also be noted that while the whole world changes in this timeline, the books focused almost entirely on events in North America. I'll try to talk about the rest of the world as much as I can, but this will primarily be from an American perspective. The secondary name of the series, Timeline 191, comes from the point of divergence from real history. In 1862, at the height of the American Civil War, Confederate General Robert E. Lee sent out an order to his army to march north through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. This order was called Special Order 191. The Confederates were planning on invading the North in order to force them to recognize Southern independence. The order involved splitting the Army of Northern Virginia into multiple parts and taking separate routes into Pennsylvania so that the Union commanders couldn't figure out what was going on until it was too late. But a Confederate officer accidentally left behind a copy of the order when his unit moved and it was picked up by enemy soldiers. This allowed Union General George McClellan to predict the route of the invasion and halted at the Battle of Antietam. The point of divergence from our timeline is simple. The orders were never found and the Army of Northern Virginia was able to smash the Union forces in Pennsylvania, even occupying Philadelphia for a time. This victory gave France and the United Kingdom an excuse to recognize the independence of the CSA and forced Abraham Lincoln to give up on emancipating America's slaves. Due to these events, the U.S. government capitulated and the CSA was granted independence. Not only that, but they were able to absorb the state of Kentucky and the Indian territory, which is Oklahoma in our timeline. West Virginia still split off from Virginia and rejoined the U.S. though. That's the gist of it anyway. Let's examine how all these changes rate on the scale. The Union Army never finding Special Order 191 is rated as likely. To be frank, it's kind of amazing that the officer who left it behind was so careless in the first place. He literally just wrapped it around a couple of cigars and dropped it in a field. Robert E. Lee defeating McClellan and smashing the Army of the Potomac is also likely. While the difference in abilities between Northern and Southern Generals is greatly exaggerated in popular imagination, the idea that McClellan was pretty incompetent is accurate.  He was great at organizing and meticulous planning, but he was far too cautious to be an effective battlefield commander. When faced with a more aggressive General like Lee, he would probably have been completely steamrolled. In real life, he was able to win the Battle of Antietam, but he didn't pursue Lee's army, even though he had the initiative. As for France and the UK recognizing the CSA, well, that's a more complicated question to answer. Let's start with the UK. The idea of them supporting a nation founded for the express purpose of preserving slavery is very unlikely, almost impossible. In many ways, Great Britain was the place that started the abolition movement. They outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and got rid of slavery entirely as early as 1833. The general populace was very anti-slavery. They viewed the British Empire as a force that uplifted savages while the other European empires were simply out for profit. Slavery was uncivilized, in other words. In fact, in real life, the CSA tried to strong arm European powers into helping them by embargoing exports of cotton. Instead, they just started getting their cotton from Egypt and India, which wound up being cheaper anyways. The question of France is a little more difficult to answer, though. At the time, France was a monarchy run by Emperor Napoleon III. Not only that, but he was in the middle of invading Mexico to set up a friendly monarchy over there. The reasons for this are complicated, but Napoleon felt confident in his ability to succeed since the Americans were preoccupied with their own war. And in this timeline his gambit worked. He crushed the Mexican Republic and installed Maximilian I as Emperor. I would say that France's recognition of the CSA's independence is likely. It would gain them a new ally, prevent the U.S. from intervening in Mexico, and cost them basically nothing. Napoleon actually being able to take over Mexico is... plausible. By 1865, the French, as well as the Mexican monarchists, had managed to take control of most of the country. But in real life, the U.S. began sending weapons and other support to the Mexican Republicans at this time, giving them a few victories and causing Napoleon to cut his losses. It should be noted that Mexican Republicans have nothing to do with the American political party. They're just people that want a republic for their government instead of a monarchy. Americans are just really bad at naming things. The biggest advantage that the French Empire had over Mexico was its industrial capacity. At the time, Mexico had very few factories and railroads, especially in the north. This means that they would have had a hard time making weapons and transporting supplies. Their disadvantage was that they had to transport most everything across the Atlantic Ocean, so the whole venture was ungodly expensive. If the war kept going, then France would have the advantage, and they very well could have conquered the whole country. It's also totally possible that they would have overextended themselves and the Mexicans would have thrown them out, so that's why this one is just plausible. So with several major victories under their belt and the support of the world's biggest powers, could the Confederate states fully split off from the United States? This is the crux of the entire setting, after all. I've already mentioned my issues with some of the other changes, but if we assume that they all happened as described in the books, then I think it's very likely that the CSA would gain independence. The American military was in complete disarray, and a large subset of their population was already against the war. With the threat of foreign invasion over their heads, public opinion would have turned against the war completely, and President Lincoln would have had no choice but to capitulate. Finally, let's look at the CSA's conquests of Kentucky and the Indian Territory. Before the outbreak of the war, the Indian Territory had several forts manned by Union soldiers, but they were all pulled out to other key areas. Not long afterwards, the Confederate army opened negotiations with some of the tribes that lived there. Many of them agreed to support the CSA, but others stayed pro-Union, and as such they began fighting amongst themselves. This continued until the end of the war when the Union army came back to the territory. In this timeline, though, the Union army never came, which allowed the pro-CSA forces to emerge victorious. I'll just come right out and say that this is a likely outcome. Most of the pro-Union forces fled to Kansas early in the war, meaning that the territory had to be reconquered later, and with the US in no position to do that, the territory being annexed into the CSA seems almost inevitable. Kentucky is weirder, though. Before the war, Kentucky was a slave state. Okay, technically it's a Commonwealth, but no one calls it that, work with me. And it actually declared neutrality early on. The majority of the population was pro-Union, though, as well as most of the state legislature. In September of 1861, Confederate forces occupied the town of Columbus, which caused Union forces to move in and intercept, which caused the legislature to officially declare for the Union. The CSA attempted a full-on invasion in 1862, and without going into too much detail, it went really well for them. They were forced out a few months later by an advancing Union army. However, this army wouldn't have existed in Harry Turtledove's timeline, so the CSA would probably have taken control of the whole state. I just don't think that they could have maintained political control of a region that was so sympathetic to the northern causes, all. There were still plenty of Confederate sympathizers in Kentucky, though, so this change is rated somewhere between unlikely and plausible. As for West Virginia, I think that it would go more or less the same as in real life. See, it was part of Virginia at the time, but after the government's enrichment declared independence, another government formed in the northwest. At first they claimed to be the rightful government of all Virginia, but by April of 1862 they had declared themselves to be a new state. This was all done before Special Order 191 was discovered, so that wouldn't change anything. With the CSA busy trying to bring its new territories under control, it probably wouldn't have the power to enforce its will on West Virginia. Of course they would really resent losing any territory, so they might throw all of their weight into taking it back. So it's a wash. This is just a plausible outcome. So one tiny change to the timeline results in a North America that's totally different than in our world. Bigger changes are coming, though. Especially once we reach... After the war ended, a lot of small changes occurred in American politics. For starters, the war is called the War of Secession instead of the Civil War. Beyond that, the Republican Party fell from power in the elections of 1864, the CSA purchased Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain, then it attempted to purchase the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua. In response to this, the U.S. declared war again, ostensibly to protect Mexican territory from being taken by an imperialist power. This kicked off a conflict known as the Second Mexican War, in which the combined CSA, French, and British forces beat the United States into total submission. In exchange for this help, though, Britain forced the Confederates to free all of their slaves. That's a lot to take in, so let's get started. Keep in mind that from here on, we're assuming that all the previous changes occurred exactly as they were described in the books, however unlikely they were. Let's start with the decline of the Republican Party. Since Lincoln and the radically progressive Republicans were seen as the cause for the war, they were voted out pretty quickly afterwards, and the more conservative Democrats took control. That's not a mistake, by the way. The parties have changed completely in the past 150 years. The Republicans were voted back into power in 1880, since the public wanted the government to take a harder stance on the Confederates. This seems likely. The American public tends to see-saw back and forth between which party they blame for their problems even today. Here's where it gets trickier. After the war, the party collapsed again. Many of its members, including former President Lincoln, left to join the newly formed Socialist Party, and it became little more than a regional party in the Midwest.  The Republicans were radically progressive for their time period, but most people only view that in the context of slavery. Abraham Lincoln was also a huge proponent for workers' rights, and he even made several statements that line up with the labor theory of value. Without going into too much depth, this theory states that the value of a good or service is derived from the labor required to produce it, rather than the supply or the demand. Aspects of the LTV are often invoked by Socialists, and it's also central to Marxism, which maintains that under capitalism, the working class is exploited by the bourgeoisie. To be clear, these statements alone don't mean that Lincoln was advocating for the abolishment of capitalism or collective control of the means of production, but they do show that he had a view of economics that fundamentally differs from just about every capitalist economic theory. He was closer to being a socialist than most every American politician at the time. In addition, people's beliefs change over time. It's impossible to say how Lincoln's experiences would have shaped him, but it's not crazy to say that he would have moved further to the left. Not only that, but with the more conservative southern states leaving the Union, the country as a whole definitely would have moved to the left. So the idea of the Republicans collapsing in a socialist party forming in the vacuum is totally plausible. The CSA purchasing Puerto Rico and Cuba would never happen. Spain's empire had been in decline for decades, arguably centuries by this point, and there's no way that they would let go of any more of their colonies willingly. It wasn't about economics, it was about prestige. So this is the first change that I'll call impossible. And neither island comes into play in the plot of the series either, so I'm not sure why this detail was included at all. The purchase of Sonora and Chihuahua, on the other hand, is much more likely. It's said that Emperor Maximilian was strapped for cash in 1880, so he sold the states to the Confederates. It makes sense that the Confederates would want to buy them, it would allow them access to the Pacific Ocean after all. Emperor Maximilian being willing to sell them is also not too crazy. Mexico was deeply in debt even before the French invasion, and having a protracted war on their soil wouldn't be great for the economy either. So the idea that they'd sell their territory is rated as plausible. It's also plausible, borderline likely, that the US would go to war with the CSA over this. They would be willing to take serious action to prevent the Confederates from gaining any new power at all. As for the European intervention, that's a lot shakier. Both France and Britain blockaded US ports, as well as bombarded them in this timeline. Not only that, but land forces in Canada invaded the country from the north. This is a lot to get to, so let's start with France this time. In both this timeline and real life, the Franco-Prussian war started in 1870. The reasons for this war are complicated, but it makes sense that it would occur since the United States had basically nothing to do with it. In summary, the area that is now Germany was a collection of about a dozen independent states, the largest of which was Prussia. France declared war on Prussia for reasons that are, again, really complicated, and the German states all attacked in response. The war was a resounding German success. It resulted in the abdication of Emperor Napoleon, France's government being restructured into a republic, and Germany finally being united into a single empire. France was completely wrecked by the war, and saddled with massive reparations to boot. Less than 10 years later, they would never have had the will or the money to prosecute a war on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. This change is unlikely. Borderline impossible. As for Britain, the naval blockade is plausible. The CSA was an ally in this timeline, and the US Navy would have been no match for the Royal Navy. Actually, invading the US from Canada is very unlikely, though. Canada is huge, thinly populated, and far away from Britain. As early as the 1860s, the Admiralty had realized that it was basically indefensible from American aggression. Not only that, but things like the unification of Germany forced them to turn their attention elsewhere. In real life, this meant making sure that relations with the US stayed friendly, and even with some sort of Warhawk governments, I find it hard to believe that they would have found a war in the Western Hemisphere worth the cost. So this is rated as unlikely. However, with all of these opponents attacking at once, the Americans didn't stand a chance. Them losing the war in this situation is very likely. It's also very likely that they would ally themselves with Germany since both countries were politically isolated and needed a dependable partner. There was also a rebellion made by Mormons in Utah during the war. In real life, there was a small Mormon uprising in 1857, but the US Army put it down very quickly and with relatively few casualties. The second uprising in 1881 seems a tad random, to be honest. The primary reason the real revolt happened was because the Mormons felt that their religious freedom was being threatened, which... Yeah, okay, it kind of was. But after the rebellion, the general atmosphere calmed down. I find it unlikely that they would want to attempt another one, even if the Army was distracted by another war. And if they did, it would probably be small and disorganized like the one in 1857. However, I'll admit that I'm far from an expert in this particular area, so I'll just rate it as plausible. The Army crackdown, complete with public executions and martial law, is likely, though. They would never tolerate any whisper of secession in this timeline. The last major change I want to talk about here is the manumission of Confederate slaves. Now, here's the thing. The CSA Constitution actually forbade Congress or the President or any state legislature from outlawing slavery. This means that the Constitution would have had to be amended to allow the slaves to be set free. This is mentioned in the book, but the idea of it passing is laughable. It would require a supermajority of states to ratify it. And when you consider that the whole reason for the CSA's existence was to protect slavery, it becomes even more far-fetched. Slavery was an integral part of their society, and I'd bet my left nut that if the people had to choose between losing the war and getting rid of slavery, most of them would choose to lose the war. There might be a couple more pragmatic souls, but they'd be outnumbered. This change is rated as unlikely, borderline impossible. And that's how the world looked in the spring of 1882. But don't worry, things are about to get crazier. So most of the changes to this point have been relatively small outside of North America. By the time you go 50 years past the point of divergence, the whole world starts to look completely different. There's a lot to get to, so let me summarize the events of the Great War real quick. After the Second Mexican War, the United States moved closer to the German Empire, becoming an official member of the Quadruple Alliance, which was the Triple Alliance in our time, along with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Meanwhile, the CSA became an official member of the Quadruple Entente with Russia, France, and the UK. And while the black slaves in the Confederacy were freed, they still had to live in apartheid-like conditions. They had to carry passbooks with them at all times, or risk a risk, and they weren't even allowed to have surnames. Just like in our timeline, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in 1914, which caused diplomacy in Europe to collapse and World War I to begin. The Entente and the Alliance, a.k.a. the Central Powers, went to war with each other, which meant that the U.S. attacked Canada and the CSA. The CSA had some early successes, even capturing Washington, D.C., but the front lines soon stagnated and the majority of the fighting became limited to trench warfare, at least at first. Around a year into the war, the black population of the CSA with the support of American weapons rose up to throw off the yoke of their oppressors. But it wasn't just a revolution for racial equality. The rebels were full-on communists, and given the nickname Reds, because Americans are bad at naming things. A dozen small socialist republics popped up overnight and were crushed one by one over the course of a year. While the lines stagnated in the east, Americans slowly began to press the Confederates back in the west. They captured the entire states of Kentucky and Sequoia, which is Oklahoma, IRL, as well as chunks of several other states. The leadership on both sides is shown to be fairly incompetent, but the Americans had an advantage in their much bigger population and industrial base. There was also another Mormon uprising in Utah, funded by the Confederates because Turnabout is fair play. The U.S. made slow progress into Canada, capturing Quebec and setting up an independent republic there. The American Navy also captured the British colony by the Sandwich Islands, Hawaii in our timeline, and managed to hold it against an onslaught from both the British and the Japanese. Both sides developed tanks during the war. However, the Americans built a lot more of them, and they figured out how to use them effectively pretty early on. They were able to break through the stagnated lines in the east and capture most of Virginia, causing the CSA to surrender by the spring of 1917. Meanwhile, in South America, Chile, Paraguay, and Brazil sided with the central powers. They blockaded and attacked Argentina, cutting off its food shipments to Europe. Not much detail is given about the war in Europe. We know that Italy stayed neutral, which it didn't do IRL, and that Germany won the battle of Verdun in 1916. Sometime in early 1917, the French Army mutinied and refused to fight any longer, which forced the French government to surrender. Around this time, the Russian Civil War also started up, which knocked them out of the war as well. In Ireland, a rebellion against British rule took place, supported by the central powers. This left the United Kingdom alone against the combined might of the central powers. Once isolated and facing starvation, they finally surrendered in the summer of 1917. In the aftermath of the Great War, a lot of things changed. Germany intercedes in the Russian Civil War on the side of the Tsar. All the communists, anarchists, liberals, and other groups that opposed his rule were crushed. In exchange, Germany carved out chunks of Russian territory to make their new client states of Ukraine and Poland. They also turned Belgium into a satellite state. Great Britain was forced to recognize the independence of both Ireland and Quebec, as well as relinquish its hold on Canada and the Sandwich Islands, which were occupied by the United States. Austria-Hungary managed to stay united in this timeline, but only barely. From what we understand, it can only hold together with German military and financial aid. It annexed Montenegro, Albania, and part of Serbia. On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States reabsorbed the states of Kentucky and Sequoia. They also took back the chunk of Maine that they lost in the Second Mexican War and most of Northern Virginia. They also split off most of western Texas to form a new state called Houston. Of course, the city of Houston is not in the state of Houston, because, as I mentioned earlier, Americans are really bad at naming things. I know that I glossed over some stuff there, but I think I hit all the important beats, and there's an absolute shitload of stuff to gut to, so let's not waste any time. First and foremost, would the First World War still start in this timeline? Probably. The U.S. had very little to do with it at first, and it was mostly due to complex ethnic and diplomatic tensions exclusive to Europe. This is rated as likely, almost guaranteed. Same with the U.S. and CSA joining on opposite sides. The war in North America probably would have gone a little differently than described in the books, though. The Confederates had very little industrial base, and over a third of their population wasn't even allowed to fight at first. The U.S. would definitely have overwhelmed them in a similar manner to the books. I just feel it would have happened sooner. However, most Confederate commanders were in defensive positions from early on in the war, which gave them a huge advantage over the Americans that were attacking. So overall, it's a wash, and this change is just plausible. Now let's discuss the Black Communists. The idea of them latching onto a socialist ideology makes perfect sense. Socialism has a lot of appeal to oppressed underclasses. And them taking the war as an opportunity to organize a revolution isn't too odd either. Similar things happen in real history. For example, IRL the Germans helps to fund and arms the Bolsheviks in Russia. If you can turn part of your enemy's population against itself, you'll distract them, or even make them collapse in on themselves. If the Americans saw an opportunity to help start a red revolution in the CSA, they'd be fools not to take advantage of it. This change is likely. One change that's a bit odd is that the influence that outbreak never happened here. This seems plausible, since whatever mutation created the virus could have easily occurred in someone that was never born in this timeline, but there's not really enough information to make an accurate judgment. The Mormon uprising in Utah is... likely. While the last uprising was weird, the brutal reprisals would certainly have created resentment among the populace. Just like black people in the CSA, the Mormons would have taken their opportunity when it struck. The U.S. taking and holding the sandwich islands seems plausible. They were going up against the largest, most powerful navy in the world, but they managed to catch them by surprise at first. Holding the territory is less likely. The Royal Navy was distracted by events in the Atlantic at the time, but the Japanese could turn their full might against the Americans. I think it's impossible to really predict. That's why this one is rated as just plausible. The other territory that they took from the CSA also makes sense. Northern Virginia would give them a buffer zone to protect Washington, D.C. Kentucky controlled the Ohio River, Sequoia had a lot of oil, and West Texas has... absolutely nothing, but taking it would piss off the Confederates. All of these border changes are likely. South America is difficult to judge here since we get very little info about the political situation. Argentina really did have strong diplomatic ties with the UK, so I guess them siding with the Entente is plausible. I just can't comment on Chile, Paraguay, or the Empire of Brazil. Oh yeah, Brazil is still an empire in this timeline. This change is rated impossible since Emperor Dom Pedro II didn't want the monarchy to continue past his lifetime at all. But the most important question is, could the Central Powers have won the Great War in this scenario? We're going to have to take a look at the situation The first major change is Italy staying neutral, which I'd rate as plausible since their military alliance with Germany and Austria was pulling them in one direction, but their need for French food and British coal was pulling them in another. And that ties into the German victory at Verdun, believe it or not. See, in our timeline, the battle of Verdun lasted from February to December of 1916, and during this, Austria was busy fighting both Italy and Russia. In the summer, the Austrian army took a few divisions of their best troops away from the Russian front to prepare for an attack on Italy. Unfortunately, the Russians launched their own huge offensive right after that, and so the Germans had to divert troops away from Verdun in order to prevent their ally from collapsing. And even more than that, in our timeline Germany had to direct a lot of its forces away from Verdun to stem a giant British attack at the Battle of the Somme. But if the British army was preoccupied with a massive Irish rebellion and the war in Canada, and they had a food shortage because of a blockade, then there's basically no way that they would have had a major attack like that. Germany came pretty close to taking the Verdun citadel in real life. If they had a few hundred thousand extra men to throw at it, I have little doubt that they would have been successful. And if they could have built up defenses around the city, then the French would have had a bitch of a time trying to retake it. They would have had to try and retake it, too. The city was a huge symbol of French national pride and allowing it to remain in enemy hands would have been unthinkable to both civilian and military leadership. They would have thrown hundreds of thousands into the fire in an attempt to get it back. In fact, the battle was actually planned by German Field Marshal Eric von Falkenhayn as a way to, quote, bleed the French white. Now, in real life, the French army mutinied in 1917 because their commanders were constantly sending them on suicidal attacks. And the army leadership was able to de-escalate the situation by, well, no longer sending them on suicidal attacks. If Verdun was taken and they were forced to attack over and over and over again, they were broken eventually. So what I'm getting at is that if Italy stayed neutral and the US joined the Central Powers, then they had a pretty good chance of winning the war. And with that, the other changes, like Austria-Hungary staying united, the defeat of the Bolsheviks, and Eastern Europe coming under German hegemony, all just fall into place. So all of the European changes to the timeline are rated as likely. Overall, this timeline really isn't that crazy.  At least so far. There are still seven books for me to get to and they get a lot stranger as time goes on. Remember how all of this started because of one guy not losing his orders?   We'll get to watch Confederate Nazis get their teeth kicked in. I'm not even joking, that actually happens. If you want to see it, be sure to rate the video, comment, and of course, subscribe.


The phrase, the earth is the Lord's, reverberates throughout Anabaptist history. Why is that? I'm here today with John Roth on another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. John, it's an honor to have you. Could you just a fact to introduce yourself to our listeners? I grew up in Holmes County, Ohio, came to Goshen College as a student in the mid-1970s. Well in love with history, while I was here, went on to graduate school in history, and then in 1985 I returned to Goshen College as a professor of history. My training was in German social history, but at Goshen part of the job was serving as director of the Mennonite Historical Library, which is an amazing collection of Anabaptist Mennonite Amish and Hatterite materials. So I retooled as a historian of Anabaptism. A couple years later I became editor of the Mennonite Quarterly Review, and so for the last 36 years I have been at Goshen College teaching, serving as editor, directing the Mennonite Historical Library, until this past summer when I retired from those positions I still have an office here on the campus of Goshen College, but I retired from those positions and took up a new position as project director of an initiative called Anabaptism at 500. So that's what I'm doing currently. Very interesting. So in this episode wanting to unpack this concept of the earth is the lords, which is a quote from Psalm 24-1. You and many others have looked at this from a historical perspective. How did that phrase influence the Anabaptist movement? And I'm thinking particularly in the early days. Yeah. Well, there are a number of scriptural passages that Anabaptists seem to have gravitated towards. Of course, we know about the Sermon on the Mount. Some of Paul's writings and 1 Corinthians have become important in terms of the Lord's supper or some other themes. But that verse from Psalms 24, almost from the very beginning, I first encountered it when I was reading a story of a young woman, her name was Elsie Baumgartner, who in April of 1525 was arrested by authorities in Zurich and charged with the crime of rebaptism. And she was sentenced to prison. And the authorities told her that they would release her from prison if she would promise never to return to the canton of Zurich again. And she refused, citing the verse, the earth is the lords, and she said that she had as much right to be here as the authorities did, which was a kind of interesting way to use that biblical argument. That verse then reappears repeatedly in the source material on 16th and then 17th century Anabaptism. It shows up in interrogations. It shows up in confessions, confessions of faith. It shows up in hymns. It's a verse that in 1614, so almost a century later, the well-known Anabaptist leader Hans Landis, 60-year-old farmer who had emerged as the leader of Swiss Anabaptism in that region just before his execution, he cited it as well, the earth is the lords and the fullness thereof. So it clearly captured the imagination of the early Anabaptists. And I think there are some strong reasons why that's so. We can maybe talk more about those, but there's no doubt about what it is, a recurring theme in Anabaptist source material. And right at the beginning from what you're saying as well, correct, like 1525, right when this whole thing is starting. Let's unpack that a bit more. How does this perspective fit into the larger context of other things that the Anabaptist cared about and would have emphasized it, especially in that time, I'm thinking more historically but even throughout history? As I've tried to sort of untangle the way that Anabaptists used this verse and why it becomes such an important light motif in their theological thinking, I've sort of identified three different themes that are associated with the earth is the lords. And the first is the one that Elsie uses. It's a statement about sovereignty. It's almost a political statement about allegiance and identity. The Anabaptists always were anchored in particular regions. We continue today to be citizens of particular countries. We carry passports. We have generally acknowledged the biblically sanctioned authority of government leaders. There were some Anabaptists who were revolutionaries, but by and large, the Anabaptist tradition has honored the authority of governments. Romans 13 government is an ordering of God. It serves a recognized function. So there is that sort of baseline respect for government authority, and yet throughout their history there also has been this radical assertion, ultimate allegiance, ultimate sovereignty belongs to God alone. And when God looks on this world, God does not see political boundaries, and God's people ultimately do not identify themselves most completely by their political allegiances. And in that sense, it made it clear to the Anabaptists that if they were in circumstances where the government could no longer tolerate them, if their beliefs were outside the limits of what governments could abide by, they would move. That God would be present wherever God's people gathered. And so in that sense, there has been a kind of disinclination to regard political identity as at the heart of what it means to be a Christian, a follower of Jesus. There's a reason, I think, why Anabaptist groups traditionally have been hesitant to say the pledge of allegiance or to sing the national anthem. I think that's changing in many contexts. I think the allure of political identity is becoming more and more powerful. And I would hope that this verse might be a kind of antidote or a warning to those of us who think that the Kingdom of God is hanging in the balance on the outcome of a presidential election, or if certain legislation does or doesn't get passed somehow the fate of the Christian identity is at stake. No, the whole earth is the Lord's and God's sovereignty and our allegiance extends beyond those political boundaries. So I think that's a really crucial element of that verse. There's a second theme that comes through repeatedly, and that's an economic claim. When we say the earth is the Lord's, the Anabaptists and I think the Amish, Mennonite, Hutterites who come in the stream of Anabaptism are reminding themselves that ultimately everything that we have comes to us as a gift from God and that we are merely stewards of that gift. The Hutterites, of course, is the group that identified this economic aspect of the Christian faith most clearly. For the Hutterites, the centrality of sharing the warnings against private possessions go back to the Garden of Eden. The original sin is the idea of mine and thine and if you are in their understanding, if you have accepted Christ, if you are a new creature in Christ, you give up that claim to what's mine and thine and you see everything as a gift and everything to be shared with those in need. Now the majority of Anabaptists in that tradition have not practiced community of goods. Most of us have said something like, yes, there is a place for private property and yet we also have had a long-standing practice of mutual aid, of understanding the kind of sharing that goes on in families to extend beyond our nuclear family, beyond our blood relations to those in the church and ultimately to wherever we encounter needy people. And I think that claim that the earth is the Lord's serves as an ongoing powerful reminder that the seductions of economic wealth and security should be actively resisted. It's one of the ironies in Anabaptist Mennonite history that virtually wherever Anabaptists have landed, whether it was the steplands of South Russia or the forests of Penns Woods in Pennsylvania or the wheat fields of Kansas or the green hell of the Potta Guayan Chaco wherever Mennonites have gone, we've started out poor and then through a combination of hard work and big families and social capital and the blessing of God, Mennonites have done very well. So we tend to have become prosperous and there is a strong temptation to look up in the second or third generation and assume that what we have came about by the work of our own hands and we lose sight of the fact that it's a gift from God. And I think this verse reminds us, should remind us, that in good times or in bad everything comes to us as a gift from God. Another theme that I see in the Earth as the Lord's motif is a kind of deep theological recognition that evil has already been defeated in this world. Now the Anabaptists, they encountered the stark reality of violence, oppression in their own lives. They were not naive. When they said, turn the other cheek or forgive enemies, they were not assuming that that was going to automatically turn enemies into friends. They went to their deaths as martyrs, many of them singing. But the reason they could do that, the reason they could be so naive about enemy love or responding to violence with generosity, is because they were convicted by a deep awareness that in this cosmic struggle between good and evil, good has already won. That in the death and resurrection of Jesus and in the promise of Christ's return, we live in the awareness that the Earth is already the Lord's, that the victory has been won, and it frees you up to be vulnerable. It frees you up to take risks. It frees you up even to put your own mortality into a bigger perspective. If you have that awareness that Christ has won the victory, that the Earth is already the Lord's. We don't have to fight for it. It belongs to God. And I think those three motifs, the political one, the economic and this deep sense that God is in control, have been themes that have helped to sustain this 500-year-old tradition, and each generation needs to remind itself again of what it might mean for us. That is powerful. I've never heard it described like that before. That is fascinating. Are you pulling a lot of this directly from studying history, or is there other theological explanations of how the Anabaptist came to it? Particularly, I'm thinking of these three points he mentioned. Can you walk me through a bit more how you dug into this? Well, you know, I am extrapolating. It's not as if any single Anabaptist sat down and said, let me provide a commentary on Psalm 24 and mapped out these three points. Some of this is my reading back into the deeper themes of the Anabaptist story, aspects that have seemed to have sustained importance for them that are often associated, sometimes indirectly, with the Psalm 24. So naturally, in developing theological and ethical understandings, the Anabaptist appealed to many, many scriptures. And first and foremost, to the life and teaching the example of Jesus, not an isolated verse from the Psalms, but I think there's continuity there. And I think there are themes there that one can legitimately identify in the larger Anabaptist story, and that I continue to take inspiration from. Segway's nicely into the next question I had for you, and this is pivoting a bit from some of the other things we were discussing with the earth as the Lords, but how does this fit with the global Anabaptist movement? As a historian, I've become keenly aware that we are living as Anabaptists. We're living in the midst of a really significant moment, a profound transformation of our little corner of God's kingdom. I mean, if you think of a 500-year-old tradition, we have basically been in Europe and North America. At the beginning of this century, there were maybe 200,000 Anabaptists in the world, mostly in Europe and North America. By 1980, 600,000 still mostly in Europe and North America. But in the last 40 or 50 years, our numbers have gone from around 600,000 to 2.2 million. And so we mean the graph or the curve goes something like this, and it's in our lifetime. In your lifetime, Reagan, I mean that something profound has been happening to the Anabaptist movement. And it's happening at a time when it feels, to me at least, like the Anabaptist movement in North America has become somewhat brittle and fragile. And we've divided in lots of different ways. And that's another story. There are perhaps reasons for that. But it sometimes feels a little worrisome, like, where are we heading? What's the future of this movement? Well, from a big perspective, the future of the movement is in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Because today, by the largest Anabaptist groups by far, groups that identify as Anabaptists, are in places like Ethiopia, in India, in Zimbabwe, in Indonesia. The reasons for that transformation, it seems to me, are fascinating, complicated, always fascinating, and they raise really interesting questions about identity. What does it mean to be an Anabaptist today? Not surprisingly, perhaps. The primary motor for that transformation has been the mission movement that started with, when we say missions in North America, we mostly have a picture, I think, of sort of classic missionaries, folks who sacrificially give up a portion of their lives in the trajectory of their careers and move to another country where they share the good news of the gospel. Well, that's important part of it. But the real story is not North American or European missions. The real story is the indigenous inculturation and mission. So the growth that has happened has been when local Christians say to the North American missionaries, something like, thank you very much, we'll take it from here. And when their mission initiatives that translate the good news into an idiom, into cultural forms, into songs, into ways of thinking that are suitable for those contexts, that the church has exploded. And it's been one of the delights for me as a historian kind of retool. And I still care about the 16th and 17th century. But in the last 15 years, primary focus of bi-energies have been on the global church and trying to understand what is happening. And what does it mean to be church? What do we mean when we say we are part of a church? And that, I think, calls for some rethinking of assumptions that many of us have made for a long time. I feel like that bit you just shared really brings it full circle from how this thread begins in the early days of the Anabaptist movement up to today. And as you were saying, this incredible growth, not just in the places we typically think of that have Mennonites, but all around the world, that's really exciting. And I think that's a powerful piece that I almost feel like we need to do a whole episode just on that story and tell more of that story. That's the last question I had on my list, but I wanted to ask one more thing. Are there any resources or things you would recommend that could tell us more of that story? Or is there anything else that you would like to add to this episode? I will say as a historian, for many years, I have taught a course in Anabaptist Mennonite history, and it was a course that I loved to teach. I taught it so often I didn't need notes. I knew this story, and I would tell the story in a very sensible way, which is what God had in mind in January of 1525 was, well, us, that the arc of the story moved in a straight line from 1524 through Europe to North America, and we use it to say, how did we get to, how did we get here? And there's, it's not a wrong way of telling the story, but in the last 15 years, I've asked myself, how would I have to tell the story differently? If I assume that from the very beginning, what God had in mind in January 1525 with those first baptisms was not just us, what God had in mind was 2.2 million Anabaptists in more than 80 countries around the world expressing their faith in cultural contexts that are very different from my own, and that that was the arc of the story from the beginning, that it was not a kind of accidental add-on. So often we tell, we write our histories, you know, that if it's 12 chapters, well, the 11 chapters are about Anabaptist Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, Plain Anabaptists, the Mission Movement, and then the last chapter is the Global Church. It's a kind of add-on, an extension of us. It's a different way of thinking about identity. If you say, no, it's a global church, what it means to be part of this Anabaptist movement is pointed towards that from the outset, and it's hard to reframe. It takes a different kind of imagination and a different narrative, but I think it's a healthy narrative in that it decenters us from the story. We're an important part of the story, but we, that is, Anabaptists in North America, are one branch of a much bigger, broader, interesting, dynamic narrative, and that we would look on our own identity in a different way if we reframed it. And I think maybe we would be a little less quick to claim certainty about our theological positions and our ethical stances. Not that we would give them up, but we would be a little humbler about our clarity of conviction on many of those, those themes. And it's an exercise that I have been doing in my own writing. And about 15 years ago, I started something called the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism. And we've done a number of things. We've done a global survey. We've worked closely with Mennonite World Conference in trying to cultivate historical narratives from the groups around the world that are part of this family. Again, all as a part of reorienting our identity in a way that opens up a space to regard those groups as brothers and sisters, not just an appendix that gets added on at the end. Well, thank you so much for sharing, John. I feel like that's a great spot to leave this particular topic. I'll think about the theme, The Earth is the Lord's quite the same way again. That was some very helpful insight. So thank you for sharing.


Hey guys, I want to talk about The back-and-forth I do where I'm at right now and why It's not a bad thing, but it's definitely an obnoxious thing So Especially with more complex things that haven't really been done again It's hard to know what the best approach to take is you know if you're say part of a dev studio who makes websites for businesses and Especially if they're similar to businesses you've already made websites for it's very easy to predict what the best way to tackle it is How long it's going to take all that stuff? There's nothing like string here In fact, even though there are other text processing libraries string here are their targets different things So for example the work SIL does is drastically different from What string here is meant for even though They're both tech processing libraries SILs deals much more with Spoken languages especially Whereas string here is just sort of general text processing but also includes like manipulation for creative writing and things like that It's Not focusing on spoken languages There's there's a component of it that does in a much more simplified way, but it's Really not addressing the same thing, you know So Since there's nothing like it. It's really hard to know How best to structure the project along anything's going to take what the best way to implement anything is and so on I don't I don't have the answer to those questions. And so that means there's a lot of back and forth now, I think it's important in that In trying different approaches seeing what works sometimes it's okay. That's just flat out better We're going to stick with that sometimes. It's I'm not sure and then you mull things over for a while and decide We're gonna try something else and maybe that thing works out or is a huge disaster and you roll back and There's a lot of experimentation Not much of this is actually involving the code itself though what I've been finding is Good Project architecture is immensely more difficult to get right than the code itself so Yeah, that's the big thing. I've been back and forth on You'd know if you've been following this work that stringier started as a mono repo And that's unsurprising especially considering it just it started as literally just some very basic extension methods Why break it apart into separate projects? this had Started to occur a little bit, but it was still a mono repo when I added another project aside from the extension methods for the patterns engine and Experimenting with that based off of some work that I had largely Largely worked out but didn't quite have working That I've done in Ida for a similar idea Implementing a snowball style pattern matching engine, but not at all like snowball did But closer to how snowball did it then how regex or partial combinators or anything else like that does it But then numerous Numerous things have been added to stringier sense them. We'll skip the whole Chronological history and jump straight to well. I now have a linguistics component that is again more basic than anything else I held us but it Largely addresses some concerns I have with culture info and how that whole system works Allowing for a much higher degree of granularity in the languages allows easier supporting of obscure languages things that don't necessarily have a culture identifier associated to them yet but That doesn't mean that they shouldn't have working computer that it's bullshit So it's a system designed around addressing that much more easily The intention was to have all like too upper too lower and to title case that everybody forgets about but that's an important thing for some languages to go through the Orthography which is part of the linguistics component instead of going through culture info especially since culture info doesn't support the two title case part but that matters any language with a digraph needs to support title casing and There's plenty of languages that support digraphs Some of them I can guarantee you've even heard of Bizarre It's very common scattered throughout different parts of Europe different parts. It's not even like it's specific to a language group.  You can't even really consider this the country because it's more like the backwoods that I'm in cares more about Globalization than an actual international company That makes sense But you've got other components as well like the categories that I did for far richer unicode categorization than the unicode categories enum It's an actual Class that can be derived and supports all sorts of complicated extensions Considering it's an actual class You can have immensely more than just 32 or 64 different categorizations and It is of itself derived from set so set theory and Set algebra are applicable to it Which means you can freely compose through set algebra the categories, which is fantastically powerful You've got the encoders API for which Has been way faster and more efficient than the crap that Microsoft has produced Like a third of the memory usage that it utilizes because it actually supports stream decoding and encoding because UTF is stream encoding this Why would you limit it to buffers when it literally does not have to be limited to buffers? It's dumb The encoding was specifically designed so that you could constantly have access to that information so that you could decode on the fly Or encode on the fly. You don't need to put that into a whole buffer, but Conveniently it is very easy to adapt stream encoders and stream decoders to buffers So I still provide the buffer encoding and decoding.  I know that's weird. I Promise that makes sense. There is such a thing as over buffering and it's bad But you know this allows the the one buffer to exist where it needs to to provide the optimizations of read and writes and Not just to support a feature that was implemented inadequately That's never a reason to use a buffer.  He didn't need to implement things, right? Glyph didn't exist when I first started this now I really don't know too many languages at all. I did discover that D actually supported this in its native library Implementation looks a little bit different than how I did it, but an actual type for working with unicode graphing clusters Which is fantastic I've been going through and adapting everything to utilize that and to making sure that the approach is very efficient and so on Because that matters. That's how people think they're working with the text and That's that's how you want to actually deal with it Otherwise you get all sorts of globalization issues and that's one of the things that stringer is trying to help prevent so their search functions and metric functions and the streams API as I Realized I needed to completely redo the streams API because Microsoft's streams are broken As in they did not test them adequately enough and it wasn't even hard to find the area in which they were broken, but they're just They're broken They can't do something what they say they're supposed to do and it's non fixable because fixing it requires moving a buffer from one location to another from one class into another and You can't you can't actually fix it Unfortunately due to some leaky abstractions you cannot actually fix it So the Microsoft streams just have to stay broken That's terrible. So Stringer streams are a replacement on that along with a redesign of it Because there are conflations of abstractions that I'll get into in a more appropriate video but Stream refers to a specific concept and I see it sometimes Shifted to the wrong level of abstraction to where streams kind of On the same level of abstraction as a file and that's not right files and streams are different and If you have them operating at the same level of abstraction, then how are they any different at all? why would you do that and So care was taken to make sure that it represents a stream and only a stream and that's the end of it that putting that into a file a Level of abstraction would require a layer on top of it for adding in the file specific stuff you know appropriate abstractions Why I was bringing up the architecture and then all of this is that Architecture has been something I've been having a Lot of back and forth a lot of struggling like I said it started as a monorebo, but it didn't develop that way I strongly favor modularity and I Think that is something we should all strive for modularity is a good thing having things as discrete modules Enables them to be more efficiently placed. There's less coupling. So testing becomes Generally far easier Coupling in and of itself is not a testing problem, although it's very prone to introducing testing problems because code that is tightly cobalt Tests tend to run through multiple pathways and get really good coverage Don't tightly couple your code just under the idea that you'll get good test coverage though because it is Extremely error prone. You need a lot of tooling to help you with that However, you need a lot of help tooling to help you with this situation of high modularization Now didn't break stringier apart to the microservices level of modular Then we'd be talking about a single package and library for a single function and that's a little insane I don't think microservices are a good idea Still trying to find somebody to convince me otherwise, but listen to quite a few conference talks. I'm on it now Probably about 20 and it's just consistently like I can't see this ever being a good idea And I'm somebody who thinks everything has a niche And I don't think it can ever be a good idea. It's too far in the other direction Things can be too monolithic though, too I don't think the monolith introduces as many problems as microservices do though but ideally you have a good middle ground a good modularization based on discrete concepts not necessarily the smallest level that you could potentially separate but just a Conceptual boundary And this is what I was doing the string here. I'd broken down each of those components that I'd mentioned into their own Modules their own libraries their own repos And I had built the entire thing up like that the stringier version 3 had been designed entirely like that now what I had been noticing however, especially during the v4 audit is there were quite a few instances a Lot of instances actually quite a few downplays it there were a lot of instances where code was being duplicated across projects for various reasons and the duplication wasn't exactly orthogonal Now this is a problem commonly seen with Microservices and I didn't even hit microservice level and I was still sitting this problem It's a strong indicator that you do not have things as granular as they could be and I Shouldn't say that it may be an indicator that you do not have things as granular as it that you could have them And that should be the first thing that you start looking into but the other possibility is that your logical boundary is wrong And that's what it wasn't my case Stringier actually needs to be tightly coupled because of how it works That seems a little weird, but let's consider an example I Had this little aside resurrected collectathon built that up to a level where to a satisfactory for use as a collections framework and collections library For use with string here to simplify a lot of the code that I had been introducing because there was a growing number of Data structures that were being implemented string here and having a framework to build upon to make those easier to implement easier to test Less code in general It's very helpful one data structure you would like to implement is the rope Ropes for those unfamiliar are a type of dynamic string It's complicated, it's not just a matter of Like a dynamic resized array or a linked list although I see a lot of people claiming to implement ropes and doing it through link lists That's not a rope guys rope refers to a very specific computer science concept If you're gonna do a linked list of strings call it something else but Again rope refers to a very specific computer science concept the ropes They have benefits I'll talk about that another time. I don't need to get into that just for the sake of this But you want to implement This data structure and have it usable throughout string here wherever it would be appropriate to use it now This means that Jesus This means that the Ropes need to be I can get to voicemail The ropes need to be accessible to all the different functions that are implemented in string here Those functions are in core. What's generally supposed to be the lowest major component. They're a bunch of minor components that are below it, but It's supposed to be the last major component structures much like the other single type libraries Should probably be below core reason being so that you could depend the core can depend on structures and then You can utilize that the pipe though the rope type and anything else that needs to be within core has to be Implemented in part with some of the functions that are in core. This isn't the only case where this kind of Coopling had happened something I wanted to do was to Certain functions would make sense to have a patterns overload much like how I was introducing categories overloads so this is a quick example of a category overload where a category makes sense as an overload is trim trim makes sense to pass in a character or a rune or a glyph and Trim those But also makes sense to put in a category So you want to trim all white space characters ignoring the fact that the one without any parent parameters at all does that Just because it's an easy example It's a trim all punctuation or trim all box characters That would be another example where this actually makes sense and isn't provided by an overload Do you want to list every single character that is there? That's a little less than ideal How do you make sure that you have them all? Unit tests, but then everybody's got to duplicate their unit tests and that means the library really isn't providing as much as it could be because Ideally you'd like to do something like that within the library Okay Category pass the category in the category does the check against every single character or rune or whatever it is iterating over Whatever that function needs to iterate over As long as it applies it does that for trim it iterates over Oh, I believe rune And so it would chop off all the runes that Match that category in the case of whites but trimming white space would clean off all the white space characters Although that overloads specifically since there is no white space characters above the basic multilingual plane What it actually does is iterate over the characters because it's slightly faster, but that's implementation details They accomplish the same thing String here ties to be a little clever at times As long as the behavior is the same the implementation deviate a little bit where where Appropriate where you can make certain assumptions. It makes those assumptions But it there are certain instances where Pattern would also be appropriate. I don't know. I'm not looking through the source code right now, so One one example I can come up with off the top of my head is like a variant of insure begins with her and insure ends with where You give it a pattern along with a default because once you have a pattern You can't just attach that pattern as text. That's the that that doesn't make any sense But you can give it that pattern and if it has You know any of those then it just returns the string as is but if it doesn't it attaches the defaults to it Say something like the lineage designator senior junior the third the fourth the fifth If it has any of those don't add it But if it doesn't have any of those then the assumption is that it's senior into senior that kind of thing it Makes sense for some methods to be able to provide patterns overloads so do you overload all of those functions and put them in the patterns library even though the Functions are supposed to be within core If you do that you have a circular dependency, but if you don't do that then you're not actually segmenting on logical boundaries, so it's It's less than ideal what it became clear is that Generally speaking stringier doesn't have these tight logical boundaries that I was trying to find in fact string your overall is The logical boundary with one exception the rune backport That can be its own thing that can stay as its own library the entire rest of stringier Has to all be merged back together. That is the appropriate architecture for it. I've almost positive that now spent the last two days doing this and What I have noticed is that when you start linking these back together when you start putting them all within the same project Oh my god, the code gets a lot simpler. You can bypass a lot of the public APIs and go to internals now that's necessarily seem like a huge deal and There are some of you that are going oh my god what the hell is wrong with you But here's a fantastic example of one of these cases glyph type The whole point of the glyph type is to as efficiently as possible represent a unicode graphing cluster Oftentimes the Unicode graphing cluster can be directly Taken from a single character or room going through the public constructors involves a whole validation check No, I can't use that example anymore because it doesn't do that anymore. It actually just directly imports it never mind But there are other there are case the encoders The public interface for the encoders and there's a lot of encoding changes done throughout stringier for various reasons the encoder public API does validation if you're encoding to surget halves into a Single unicode scalar value, it's going to make sure that the high surrogate is the actually a high surrogate and that the low surrogate It's actually a low surrogate And that's going to take that scalar value and construct a room from it and as part of that it's going to validate that the Scalar value that is which were to turn back is an actual valid scalar value There is an internal Unsafe version of this encoder that the public one calls That doesn't do those checks because essentially it's the public API's job to do the checks and then just call the unsafe one so if you're doing work otherwise and You know that you produced valid stuff for various reasons, whether it's some type of assertion that you can Make or you've already just validated it Why would you validate again by passing it into the public one? just Pass it into the private one that the internal unsafe one that's You don't need to check the same thing multiple times And it's faster if you don't so all of that modularity Flood and kind of modularity given Right kind of system the right kind of architecture and everything you can accomplish that and in fact a big part of why I constantly tried to do that with my projects is that Actually the way that I Name spacing works through its packages enforces that that is possible which is clever, but There are a few leaky problems There's certain exploit you can do because of an information leak that should not exist and then exploit is problematic But the general idea about how to add deals with that is actually Fantastic and allows that higher degree of modularity Which is then never utilized by any project that I've seen out there and it's mind-boggling why that's the case Because you could actually build each package as a discrete shared library and swap them out freely because I had a has very strict rules on how that's done unlike C++ if that's a much more feasible thing to do That's fantastic a good package manager would be able to exploit the living hell out of that to provide all kinds of special Efficiencies, but it's just not just not done So bring your has to be built as As what is essentially a single mono repo Not including the room back for is what it is, but this is fine because the point of string here is to be a large part of the runtime for Langley and then What Langley gets used to build? and those things can Design modularity right into the language and to address this problem a little better It's only a delayed problem. It'll go away in time for now string here is just Very tightly coupled


Britain's King Charles attended an Advent service and Christmas reception at the Coptic Orthodox Church Centre UK, in Stephenich, Hertfordshire, on December 5. I wanted to wish you nothing but a very happy Christmas King Charles said after a church service held with his Eminence Archbishop Angalos, the first Coptic Orthodox Archbishop of London, the King's visit took place on the same day as Prince Harry S. Lawyer told London's High Court, the Prince has been subjected to unlawful, unfair and unjustifiable treatment by the British government over the decision to take away his police protection when he is in Britain, Harry, who is the younger son of. King Charles, along with other senior royals, had received full publicly funded security protection provided by the state before he decided to step back from his royal duties and move to California with his American wife Meghan in 2020. I wanted to wish you nothing but a very happy Christmas indeed, Your Majesty. Thank you.