1632 institutions

List of 1632 series institutions and organizations encompasses both fictional and historical governmental, private and military entities, offices, institutions, and organizations that appear in the rich and diverse neo-historical background of the plot lines that make up the shared universe milieu of the rapidly growing best selling 1632 series

Institutions and organizations
A large part of the fascination with alternative history treatments, and the 1632 series as a whole, is the glimpses such fiction gives of the historical underpinnings of todays world (i.e. Modern Europe), and by extension, all of the Modern World including the "new lands" of North and South America as they factor into the times. Some topics will be listed below which have an encyclopediac treatment elsewhere (real history), but some such topics will also be listed here below as well when the fictionalized background within the series emphasize important "other factors" deserving of coverage for their literary importance, background development driving the series plot themes, or equivalently, serve as thematic elements worthy of separate mention or emphasis to the overall milieu &mdash;and so will be elaborated on in the sections following based upon such considerations and their relevancy in the 1632-verse neo-historical exposition.

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the 1632-verse fiction is that it has a background that has been grown as a years-long (on going since early 2000) collabortative effort by several hundreds of people, doing their best to make the neohistory as realistic as possible given the original series starting premises. (''See The Grantville Gazettes, 1632 Editorial Board, 1632 Research Committee, 1632 Tech Manual, and www.1632.org.)

Allocation Committee
The Allocation Committee, or more correctly, the Grantville Allocation Committee was born as part of the interim government setup by the Grantville Emergency Committee soon after the Ring of Fire forced the towns people to reorganize and plan for an uncertain future. As an arm of the government, the committee administered certain properties which were nationalized for best use either from absentee owners, or such resources which needed expenditure wisely with forethought such as vehicles, ammunition, weapons of all kinds and so forth. The Allocation Committee plays a large background role in the plots of many tales presented in the short fiction of the series, as well as occasional allusions to it in the major works. The speed boats used in the naval as well as the rocketry and indeed the aircraft as do the ironclads&mdash;abuilding in the  story "In the Navy", the novel, and their sequel &mdash;all have a heavy reliance on the edicts of the committee.

Armored Personnel Carrier

 * See

1632 Battle of Breitenfeld

 * Main articles: (fiction or essay) and Battle of Breitenfeld (1631)

While not an 'institution' per se, in contrast with the encyclopediac treatment of the Battle of Breitenfeld (1631), which serves to sketch the overall encounter, this is listed here as an important exposition of the background behind the Protestant-Catholic wars of religion known collectively as the Thirty Years' War. In a full chapter of 1632 Flint spends expends revealing relevant related factors preparatory to covering the topic of the battle proper, which taken together, the whole stands both as an authoritative deep background essay on the evolution of the art of arms in the fifteenth to eighteen centuries as well as a character study of the historical figure of Gustavus II Adolphus and some of his key generals. In the chapter (34), details of how the "Pike and Shot" armies of the day were structured, operated, limited, officered, and maneuvered are set forth very clearly.

Committees of Corespondence

 * Inspired by Mike Stearns scheme of launching the American revolution "150 years early", the Committees of Corespondence are one of the first institutions influencing European thought and the neo-historical developments unveiled in the narrations. Headed by Gretchen Richter, the Committees start from a seed population in Jena that is planted in even as the Americans march to their second deliberate battle in defense of a community of Greater Thuringia, Germany.

Confederated Principalities of Europe

 * The Confederated Principalities of Europe (CPoE) was a jury rigged government negotiated between Mike Stearns, insisting that the (NUS) keep it's constitution, and Gustavus Adolf II, in the persona of Captain-General Gars, an alias he used traveling incognito in our real world history. Under the arrangement, Captain Gars was protector of the NUS, and Emperor of the rest of the conquered territories of Germany. The CPoE was short lived&mdash; coming into effect in November of 1632 after the cavalry rescue by Gustavus' men at the  and ending on October 11th–12th, 1633&mdash;a day or two after the death of Germanies first national hero  flew to his immortal death during the.

Gearing down
Gearing down is a long term survival strategy recommended by the technical advisors to the and adopted by the whole  (GEC) and the successor government of the  as the best way forward to ensure maintaining as much technology as possible and keeping a technological edge over the many international powers active in Europe. In two words, the immediate impact can be described as "Steam Engine".

By gearing down, which became something of a mantra and motto, the town citizens mean to plan ahead and use the assets such as up-time machine shops and to create a sustainable 19th century technology base, in anticipation of parts wearing out and failing, or the normal breakage&mdash;for example as detailed in one short story &mdash;machine tool cutting heads, lathe tools or drill bits. In general, the philosophy is to create a technology more advanced than any in other European nations, to maintain an edge and naturally business opportunities, since wealth is closely tied to national security capabilities. Hence the GEC aims not in maintaining a fleet of motor vehicles, which contain thousands of parts and dozens or hundreds which require special tooling they need the machines to make the machines to make, but instead use the tech base to establish the railways and more advanced canals typical after long years of nineteenth century development.

Instead of attempting modern repeating automatic rifles, the strategy is to equip a professional army with a long range flintlock capable of three shots per minute&mdash;in the day of 1632-1634&mdash; and of outdoing any firearms in enemy hands in both rate of fire and range & accuracy. The strategy anticipates an eventual gearing up by conversion to a breech loading percussion cap (the bottle neck of production&mdash;they must build a whole industrial chemical complex as well as specialized tooling, which goes toward the reasons for not producing modern propellants and staying with a black powder weapon for a few years as well.) or bolt action, or other advanced designs as other dependent technological factors are resolved to support the higher technology. The crucial differences are in what is producable outside the five advanced machine shops with perhaps a strategic assist in making a specialized tool from the machine shops&mdash;which are therefore operated in a manner to preserve their ability to assist&mdash;to make the tools that make the produced artifacts, while concurrently not acting without forethought "in the moment" to overuse irreplaceable tooling so that it wears out prematurely.

This backfires on at least one occasion, when they underestimate what 17th century technology is capable of, and find their enemies have been able to use up-time ideas to build more advanced rifles.

Emergency Committee Cabinet
The Emergency Committee cabinet...

Grantville Constitutional Convention
The Grantville Constitutional Convention took place in the late fall of 1631 (NTL) when the Emergency Committee Cabinet decided in an October meeting the security situation via foreign armies and sufficient internal stabilization of Grantville's refugee influx situation and recent victory in the allowed for a reasonably secure transition of power. The chapter denoting the decision ends with the words "Politicking! Whoopee!" and serves as a lead in to an indirect further demonization of John Chandler Simpson, who heads a coalition opposed to giving francise rights to down-timer (German immigrants) without extensive Jim Crow laws limiting the right to vote&mdash;a stance abhorant to Stearns and his circle. The demonization is carried out in a political rally at the

Grantville Emergency Committee
The Grantville Emergency Committee was formed by the Emergency Town Meeting three days after the Ring of Fire precipitated Grantville into late May of 1631 when the town council pronounced themselves incompetent for the tasks needed by the ROF crisis&mdash;setting in place emergency measures to prioritize use of and allocate resources, govern the town on an iterim basis, including long term planning and establishment of a more suitable governmental form, and the handling of the influx of refugees inundating Grantville in their short experience in the 17th; a count of which was estimated to be as high as the town's up-timer population. By implication, 50-100 persons were empaneled on the committee, but the actual power was held by and exercised through the Emergency Committee Cabinet formed and populated at the behest of the Chairman of the Committee, Mike Stearns, who was elected by near unanimous acclaim after a remarkably memorable scene at odds with John Chandler Simpson. Dribs and drabs of committee business decorate the background of the Grantville Gazettes, but in the novel, the action all devolves around the cabinet. The committee eventually reported out a new constitution and scheduled elections for what became the, but as early as the , the townspeople were referring to themselves as the United States, and inveigling neighboring municipalities to throw off the yoke of authoritarian rule and join their new republic.

Grantville Firearms Roundtable
The Grantville Firearms Roundtable is a non-fiction sub-group of the volunteers from 1632 Tech Manual, and an officially recognized sub-committee of the 1632 Research Committee that advises on the likely path that firearms developments will likely take in the 1632-verse neohistory. The non-fiction essays and articles they have produced are listed.

Grantville High School
Grantville High is the largest and best equipped facility for handling large numbers of people in the area the Ring of Fire (ROF) exchanged into Thuringia. Its gymnasium is the site of larger assemblies of all kinds&mdash;from the Emergency town meeting three days after the Ring of Fire, to stage plays such as Bad, Bad Brillo. Many of it's rooms and facilities were co-opted by the Emergency Committee immediately after the ROF, and even through the 1634 books, many services (the dispensary and library are open 7-24-365, for example, and a resettlement/refugee center has been located on the grounds) are still provided at the school, as well as normal education&mdash; which resumed normally a few days after the ROF. Under the press of the inflow of refugees, many night courses and fuller use of the facilities came about. The physical plant of the High School is faithful to the physical plant of the North Marion High School (see photo) in Mannington, West Virginia, the town and its resources are based upon.
 * External links
 * http://www.labs.net/schools/marion/nmhs/
 * http://www.manningtonmainstreet.org/
 * http://www.klaus-leiss.de/1632Tech/index.php/Main_Page

Green Regiment
The Green Regiment is described in as being the parent military unit of   and 's detached company soon after  he meets Stearns interrupting the  and is  introduced to  early in the novel. By the spring of 1632 (NTL), Mackay is described as heading up over a thousand men, which leads to promote Mackay to Colonel, and means he's leading a regiment size unit attached to the parent regiment.

League of Ostend
The League of Ostend (or Ostend Alliance) is a fictional alliance put together by the diplomatic initiatives of French prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu, in the spring and summer of of both Protestant and Catholic nation-states to oppose the alliance of the New United States and the king of Sweden, Gustav II Adolf, in the newly formed . Richelieu was reversing his decades long prior policy of doing anything within reason to aggrandize France and its power, especially things which would thwart the Habsburg dynasties controlling the eras great power, Spain, and the regional power of the Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand II. Consequently, Richelieu covertly blocked Spanish ambitions to regain the Low Countries and had similtaneously. but niggardly bankrolled Gustavus Adolf's intervention on behalf of the Protestant princes of the Germanies against the German Catholic League.

League of Ostend member states include Protestant kingdoms Denmark and England as well as Catholic France and Spain; the leagues active manifestation (though suspected by Rebecca Stearns after her audience with Richilieu in ) began with a treacherous Pearl Harbor event: The Protestant Dutch, but recently independent of Spain and the Spanish Netherlands sailed with the allied fleets of England and France to oppose a new invasion by Spain (A second Spanish Armada, in effect, complete with a large auxiliary fleet of transports carrying an expeditionary army under the command of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand)&mdash; but in reality, both the French and English naval officers had sealed orders (an idea passed to Richilieu from his spies from the fiction of C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series) to be opened before joining battle&mdash;orders which announced the new alliance, and ordered them to fall on the Dutch and support the Spanish fleet.

The results were devastating for the navy of the Danish republic, and using subterfuge, the Spanish forces were able to land behind key defenses of Flushing in Zealand and thrust their expeditionary force into the heart of the republic. Spain's forces conquered most of the Netherlands and began a siege of Amsterdam, which along with two provinces and the rump remains of a third were all the territories left not fallen into Catholic hands.

Marion County power plant
The short story describes in detail how the Schwarza river in Thuringia is cut by the edge of the Ring of Fire at Schwarzburg, and falls downslope to replace the feeder stream of Buffalo Creek, which is important, for it provides cooling water to the Marion County power plant (Grantville's) electrical power plant. The power plant is the biggest technological edge the up-timers have in their dangerous new environment, and it's in-plant machine shops have large artifice handling equipment and tooling that are not present in the other machine shops in Grantville. Despite running at a mere fraction of rated capacity after being severed from the power network in the United States and Marion County, West Virginia, the immediately begins planning in June of 1631 to gear-down and replace the steam turbine generated power generation with nineteenth century era steam engine technology. The story  covers events at the power plant in the hours immediately after the ROF occurs.

Lothlorien Commune
The Lothlorien Commune is a hardscrabble farm and greenhouse abandoned in the nineties by "all the  &#91;Hippie&#93; 'Old-Ladies'" to the care and possession of, who figure large in the South European Thread and in Europe in general, as a love interest spurs  into recalling his graduate work at Purdue University and single-handedly injects a 200 year Pharmacological and Microbiological boost into the knowledge and studies of Europe, where he becomes known as Herr Docktor Stone, guest lecturing at the University of Jena and University of Padua (as so far documented in the series works). Just by providing the analgesic Canabis he might have become famed, but the Lothlorien greenhouse and barn also began sprouting, and by 1633-34, an easy to make early broad-spectrum antibiotic (about 250 years early) which with typical Stearnsian calculation of primal forces underlying historic events, the prime minister causes to have leaked deliberately (complete with sketches of manufacturing apparatus) to the Spanish forces. The commune's influence on future events is thus tremendous, as Stearns is playing for the hearts and minds of the European masses, shifting the ground from under the authoritarian nobility, while they try to control events in the same old ways.

New United States

 * The New United States (NUS) was the up-timer name for their revolutionary republic formed towards the end of 1631 in the novel, when they earned goodwill in central Germany by forming a loose alliance with Gustav's cavalry forces under Alex MacKay in the exchange:

"Tilly's beasts are pouring into Thuringia. They will be taking the larger cities soon, then plundering the countryside like locusts. I cannot possibly stop them, not with my few hundred cavalrymen. But&mdash;"

His eyes fixed on Michael's revolver. Suddenly, startlingly, Michael clapped his hands together.

"Oh&mdash;that kind of alliance!" he exclaimed. Michael was grinning from ear to ear. The sheer good humor of the expression, for all the ferocity lurking in it, was like pure sunshine.

"Sure, Alexander Mackay. We accept

The joined forces of MacKay's cavalry company and the NUS miners fight several memorable battles during 1631:, the , the and the two phase battles against Spanish regular forces sent from the Spanish Netherlands&mdash;the  and the. 

Office of the Holy Inquisition

 * With it's setting amidst the (mainly religiously inspired or excused) Thirty Years' War it is no surprise that the series repeatedly hammers the and discusses it's various attributes and implementations in various books of the series in a large amount of detail. As the historical research in the series is excellent, a 1632 reader quickly learns the early inquisitions were formed to ferret out and forcibly convert secret jews (Marranos) like  and secret Moslems (Moriscos). In the flagship novel, the American leader's take particular satisfaction in burning members of the Spanish Inquisition alive using Napalm in the ; members of the inquisition take center stage in , and the Italian inquisition is attacked by the Spanish in , whereas the sequel , members of the privy council of both the Holy Roman Emperor and the Elector of Bavaria are depicted to be catholic priests and members of the Inquisition, and further, have been the powers behind the leaders who had set forth the underlying secular causus belli, the Edict of Restitution.

Personnel Carrier, Armored
In 1632-verse Armored Personnel Carriers (APC) are originally up-armored "Coal Mining Trucks"&mdash;construction vehicles of implicitly greater than ordinary size and capacity with thick walled dump beds and thick heavy duty man-high tires as would be common more to strip mining operations than are likely found in the shaft mining region in hilly West Virginia. As such, they are an example of one of the few "technical flaws" in Flint's background assumptions in the flagship novel. Some are represented as Semi-tractor trailer types of vehicles, in during the run up to the  where several are used to transport up-timer speed boats cross-country to the proper riverine watershed, a much more likely type given the source region.

Regardless of the unlikelihood of six heavy walled massive road construction/strip mining vehicles being present in small town rural West Virginia, the up-timers took what they had and added armor plating in the form of "shutters" over the windows, cut rifle slits in the beds and had at least six employed at the (Eisenach) with mention of nearly as many at the  a full year-earlier. They are also credited at Nürnberg with leading an armored breakthrough behind the lines of at the sketchily described  that ends the lead novel 1632.

Saint Mary's Parish
Saint Mary's Parish is the town of Grantville's native Catholic church, and was, before the advent of the Ring of Fire, Saint Vincent de Paul's&mdash;which gets to be awkward inasmuch as de Paul is currently alive, and not all that highly regarded outside of France. The parish priest (better known as "Larry") becomes famed in the neohistorical timeline where the local powers that be are constantly sending spys into the alien town from the far future&mdash;and since religion and religious strife were much larger parts of the mindsets found in the time, the spys and dispatches almost always report on the Catholic parish, it's priest, and how well its community and its pastor get along with the many protestant sects, and even the Jews who find haven in or came with the town from the future. Because of this repute, Fr. Mazzare is selected to be the last chance Ambassador to Venice and its waning merchantile connections as the desperately needs to open up trade for raw materials unobtainable elsewhere because of the war with the. When he goes on this mission for the state (See ) the curate he hires in none other than the famed Jesuit polymath, who was attracted to the scientific and technical wonders of Grantville around 1632-1633.

SRG rifle
The novel surprised readers with the introduction of the lower tech SRG rifle, than that which had been expected, given the knowledge of gun buffs resident in Grantville. The fact essay was written in response to the surprise and devulges the material and production factors that lie behind the choice of this black powder rifled weapon with an advanced flintlock firing system, and further why more advanced things like percussion caps, breech loading, bolt action, cartridges, etcetera were left for a follow-on evolutionary stage beyond this weapon&mdash;which would have been right at home at the beginning of what technology and military historians consider the first modern war, the American Civil War. The SRG design was chosen in large part, because it was a design that could be upgraded in stages, not only to percussion caps, but also to a breech loader as technolgical support and infrastructure is put into place.

State of Thuringia-Franconia

 * The state of Thuringia-Franconia is the incarnation of the former New United States under the CPoE as established during the founding of the Empire of the United States of Europe. The Franconia region was given to to administer for Gustavus at the conclusion of his negotiations with Mike Stearns at the end of . Large portions of the parallel mainline thread, the ground-eye view of events play out in the state in the main works  and, plus hosts of short stories in various volumes of The Grantville Gazettes.

The Newspapers
The short novelette "Other People’s Money" by continues the adventures of the teenage entrepreneurs and their families started in. Further this tale introduces the three active newspapers covering events in the region immediately around Grantville, and details their reporting styles and target audience:

The Street
&mdash;aiming for a staid financial coverage similar to the Wall Street Journal

The Grantville Times
&mdash;which similarly emulates the reserved style of the New York Times

The Daily News
&mdash;which is contrasted as flashy and incautious in what it prints, but has an editorial policy championing the idea that the death of any up-timer is an irrevocable and unpardonable loss, and that policies ought to be in place to prevent any up-timer from taking unnecessary risks.