u/vahedemirjian

Zheng He led seven major expeditions between 1405 and 1433 for the Ming Dynasty. His later voyages—specifically the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh expeditions—reached East Africa. One of the possession that the Chinese emperor received from East Africa was a giraffe.

The Xuande Emperor discontinued expeditionary voyages beyond China's territorial waters in 1433 because he regarded those voyages as expensive?

What would modern East African history have been like if Chinese dignitaries established colonies in East Africa during the remainder of the 15th century?

George W. Bush was serving his second term as governor of Texas when he decided to run for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2000 presidential election.

Bush 43's presidency was defined by the Global War on Terror and the Iraq War even though George W. Bush began his first term of office making good on his pledge to implement his policies of compassionate conservatism.

Would the US have bothered going to war in Iraq if a non-Bush rather than Bush 43 had won the GOP presidential nomination in the 2000 election?

A number of members of the interwar German Communist Party (outlawed after Hitler's rise to power in 1933) became members of the National Committee for a Free Germany when that organization was founded in July 1943.

What would Germany's culture and military have been like if communists who were part of the National Committee for a Free Germany had made a daring raid into Berlin to topple the Nazi government sometime after the failed July 20, 1944 plot to kill Hitler?

When Yuri Andropov died on February 9, 1984, after governing the USSR for a little over a year, Konstantin Chernenko became Soviet leader. However, Chernenko was from the same generation as Brezhnev and Andropov, dying in March 1985.

Given that Mikhail Gorbachev was the first and only Soviet leader born after the October Revolution, what would his initial tenure have been like if he had succeeded Andropov as Soviet leader?

When FDR was elected to a third term of office in the 1940 presidential election, no one in the US ever imagined that he would die of a cerebral hemorrhage five years later.

The American Catholic priest Charles Coughlin reacted to Adolf Hitler's invasion of the USSR by issuing a radio broadcast hailing the invasion as "the first strike in the holy war on communism" and accusing Jews of having dragged the US and UK into war with Nazi Germany.

Given that Coughlin was a far-right Catholic priest who not only defended Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union but was also anti-Semitic, what would the bilateral relationship of the US with the Axis Powers have been like if he had run for the Democratic presidential primary in the 1940 presidential election and gone to win the 1940 election?

The Roman Republic conquered Judaea in 63 BCE, and it maintained a system of semi-autonomous vassalage in the region.

In 6 CE, Judaea was made a province of the Roman Empire.

From 66 to 70 CE, the Jews rebelled against Roman rule over Judaea, but the Romans suppressed the revolt and destroyed the Temple of Herod in 70 CE.

Had Rome not conquered Judaea, any levels of anti-Semitism in Europe would have been fairly low.

Ever since the fall of the Third Reich historians have debated whether the US Army Air Force should have bombed the death camps at Auschwitz, with some arguing that doing so would have saved the lives of European Jews languishing at Auschwitz and others saying that any attempt by the US military to bomb the Auschwitz death camp would have diverted attention away from weakening the German war effort in World War II.

Although the USAAF would have been too focused on pounding the German war machine to dispatch a handful of bomber aircraft to attack Auschwitz, the Soviet Union had a handful of bombardment aircraft in service with operational ranges far enough to reach the easternmost parts of Nazi-occupied Poland, including the Ilyushin DB-3 and Il-4, the Petlyakov Pe-8 (TB-7), and Yermolayev Yer-2. Bearing in mind the fact that Operation Barbarossa made the USSR recognize Hitler as a threat to Slavic peoples in Eastern Europe and Stalin mouthed off at Hitler's narrative of communism as having been invented by Jews just because the writer of the Communist Manifesto was of Jewish ancestry, it would have been personally palatable for VVS commanders to send DB-3s, Il-4s, Pe-8s, and Yer-2s to bomb railroad lines leading to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor.

William Henry Harrison was one of four presidents who died in office from natural causes.

Harrison caught pneumonia while giving his inaugural address, and his presidency remains the shortest of any presidency in US history.