What Is This? 

This is a scaled-down version of the magazine I put in POD, the alternate history Amateur Press Association magazine.  I've been toying with the concept of alternate biography lately--coming up with plausible people who either didn't exist or had little influence on their world, and then working out how they might have changed history.  I have two of those scenarios in this issue.  Max Bauer really did exist, and really did all of the things I have him doing in this scenario up until 1929.  In reality he then died of smallpox.  In the scenario he goes on and changes history in some significant ways.  My description of his early activities relies heavily on an article by John P. Fox in Contemporary History titled Max Bauer: Chiang Kai-shek's first German military adviser.

Francisco De Lugo, on the other hand, is an entirely fictitious  character, though his life history is based very loosely on a real-life Portuguese castaway in Brazil.

I also add in the introduction to a hard copy collection of my alternate history scenarios tentatively called American Indian Victories.  The collection pulls together the best of the scenarios from my newsletters, adds in some of the material from the print versions and turns all of that into a book of just short of 200 pages.  I've got the collection organized and pretty much ready to go except for some editing work, so hopefully the result will see the light of day in the near future. 

I unfortunately had to postpone the next installment of the time-line where Hitler doesn't declare war on the US after Pearl Harbor.  I didn't have anything you haven't already seen ready for this issue of POD.  In the past I've added things for the on-line version and then put them in the next hard-copy issue of the newsletter, but that gets very confusing so I try to avoid it.  The next installment of this time-line will be in the February version of the newsletter, which should be out shortly, so you won't have to wait much longer.