Africa During the Scramble: The Reality behind 'The Woman King'
By Gary Oswald The first articles I ever wrote for this site were a three part series looking at the Kingdom of Dahomey in modern day...
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Mar 31, 202219 min read
Africa During the Scramble: The Black Napoleon
By Gary Oswald The African Polities of the late 19th century threw up more than their fair share of brilliant military leaders and...
Mar 17, 20227 min read
Can you write an historical story ignoring War?
By Gary Oswald It’s not exactly insightful to say that Historical Fiction, Alternate History included, is obsessed with war, and there...
Mar 2, 202210 min read
Africa During the Scramble: The not so Free Towns
By Gary Oswald As previously discussed, Sierra Leone began as a utopian private project wherein the black poor of Europe and North...
Dec 31, 20218 min read
Alternate History as a Political Tract
By Gary Oswald Politics is innately concerned with Alternate History. When your party wins an election and then you have to go back four...
Sep 6, 20214 min read
The Hour of the Wolfe
By Gary Oswald On the Sea Lion Press Forums, we run a monthly Vignette Challenge. Contributors are invited to write short stories on a...
Jul 16, 20215 min read
'Axis of Andes' review
By Gary Oswald Amateur AH exists for the same reason any amateur writing does. Partly because people just like to write in a relatively...
Feb 20, 20219 min read
Man’s Holy Cause
By Gary Oswald On the Sea Lion Press Forums, we run a monthly Vignette Challenge. Contributors are invited to write short stories on a...
Feb 15, 20218 min read
Prequel Problems: Brian Michael Bendis' Shared World Adventures
By Gary Oswald Brian Michael Bendis is an American Comic Writer who has written and drawn numerous comic books over the last 30 years. He...
Jan 29, 202119 min read
Africa During the Scramble: The Settler's Republic
By Gary Oswald The coastal people of modern day Liberia and Sierra Leone, especially those who spoke one of the Kru languages, had done...
Jan 23, 202117 min read
Africa During the Scramble: Prodigal Sons
By Gary Oswald Prior to the 19th Century, white people were rare in Africa. Residents in the big slaving ports would be used to white...
Jan 15, 202116 min read
Africa During the Scramble: The Blockade
By Gary Oswald It is estimated that in the 1780s less than a quarter of the human world was what we would consider free. The rest were...
Jan 9, 202115 min read
Africa during the Scramble: I am not an Animal
By Gary Oswald This series of articles normally looks at countries, here we're going to focus instead on two individuals, one who lived...
Jan 2, 20217 min read
Africa during the Scramble: Exile to Paradise
By Gary Oswald Wars inevitably lead to exiles. When the Haitian Revolution saw the Black Slaves of Hispaniola take control of that...
Dec 28, 202011 min read
The Reveal
By Gary Oswald Advertising a book or movie can be a tricky thing. A good narrative often relies on surprise, on making the audience think...
Dec 26, 20206 min read
The Alternate History stories on Archive of Our Own
By Gary Oswald Amateur online Alternate History fiction and fanfiction have a lot in common. They’re both the products of communities of...
Dec 19, 202014 min read
Africa during the Scramble: Poetry in the Desert
By Gary Oswald ‘I have rejected the abundant wealth the colonizers were willing to offer me. By abandoning my religion for the...
Nov 16, 202013 min read
Africa during the Scramble: The Man behind the Mahdi
By Gary Oswald Abdallahi Ibn-Mohammed Al-Khalifa more than anyone else could be said to have created the Mahdist revolt. He had been born...
Nov 13, 202013 min read
Africa During the Scramble: The Mahdi
By Gary Oswald There is a tendency by students of history to place greater emphasis on motives that make sense within your own worldview....
Nov 11, 202012 min read
Africa During the Scramble: Egyptian Ambition
By Gary Oswald This article, the first of three about the Sudanese wars, is about Egypt during the scramble of Africa when it was still...
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