^I've wondered about that, too. I've seen several fan-made timelines of the MU dating back to George Washington's time, and the information they contain just doesn't seem that realistic.
For example, one of the timelines stated that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by operatives hired by Martin Luther King. Now, putting aside the numerous conspiracy theories pertaining to Kennedy's death, it just doesn't seem plausible that something like this would've happened--in any universe. Why would a man like Dr. King--who spent his entire life trying to bring people together--be responsible for something that could've torn the United States apart?
Edited paragraph: Without having read that fic, I would presume that the author's intention was to go with the "good people are bad in the Mirror Universe" conceit. In which case, presumably in that version, Dr. King wouldn't have been an activist for equality and civil rights, but would instead have been a partisan fighting for black supremacy rather than white supremacy. An alternate possibility, of course, might be that Dr. King was a genuine freedom fighter who didn't believe in nonviolence in that fic, a la Nelson Mandela.
If we go with the "good people are bad in the Mirror Universe" conceit, though, this does directly contradict Chapter 17 ("A Secret Called Freedom") of
The Sorrows of Empire, wherein Dr. King is established to have been among anti-authoritarian, individualist, and/or revolutionary authors, activists, and leaders whose works were still censored by the Terran Empire in the 23rd Century.
End edit.
(Other such authors and activists included Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, Ayn Rand, George Orwell,
N.E. Peart,
Zacarías Manuel de la Rocha, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Mahatma Gandhi.)
(Side-note: I never realized until just now, looking it up, that the references to Peart and de la Rocha were references to the bands Rush and Rage Against the Machine!)
So I think one of the creative conceits behind the Mirror Universe, at least as it is currently interpreted in Trek Lit, is that real history's famous activists for human liberty remained such in the M.U.
For what it's worth, the preceding story in
Glass Empires,
Age of the Empress, contains a reference to palaces being built in North America in the early 21st Century by Emperor George II. I take this to be the Mirror Universe counterpart to former U.S. President George W. Bush -- and I find myself wondering about the history that lead to the creation of the Terran Empire, in particular U.S. history.
Did the United States ever exist in the Mirror Universe, or did some other polity form out of the European settler cultures that evolved in North America? Perhaps the Terran Empire's ancestral state was the counterpart to the U.S. -- apparently some sort of de jure American Empire? The reference to Dr. King suggests that the M.U. counterpart to the U.S., whatever it may have been called, still at some point in its history organized its society around white supremacy and race-based caste slavery. By the 2150s, the Empire still practices slavery, but it appears to have reserved that status for non-Humans; I find myself wondering what kinds of movements would have evolved to fight the race-based American slave system without actually ending slavery itself as a de jure legal institution.
One scenario suggests itself:
Age of the Empress is essentially the story of how the Empire, faced with a rebellion by its conquered peoples, chose to placate the elites of the conquered peoples by making them full partners in the Empire, thereby transforming the Empire's repression from one focused outwards ("Humans enslaving aliens") to one more inwards ("Humans dominate with aliens as junior partners, and all combine their resources to repress their domestic populations"). Perhaps something similar happened to the Mirror America -- a slave rebellion eventually led to blacks being integrated into white society, black elites becoming junior partners in the imperial regime, but with the resources of both being rededicated to repression against domestic society, and/or to the repression of foreign peoples overseas.
That does raise the question of what FDR's role in M.U. American history would have been. Presuming he kept his general role as someone who worked for human liberty (hence his speeches being censored in the 23rd Century), one wonders if it is plausible to imagine he would have been a head of state like his real-life counterpart. Maybe the Mirror FDR was someone who inherited the American throne and tried to initiate democratic reform, but was thwarted by the Mirror Universe equivalent to the
Business Plot? That would nicely preserve the general Mirror Universe conceit of "everyone has roughly the same job until the fall of the Empire" while explaining why he'd be an un-person in the 2270s.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that the leaders of the Terran Empire altered historical records to make Earth and its allies appear more threatening to outsiders (Klingons and Romulans), which raises the question of whether Zefram Cochrane really shot his Vulcan visitors, if that was part of the Empire's propaganda.
Well, we the audience actually saw that happen from the same omniscient third person point of view from which we always see events. So I think it's highly likely that Mirror Universe Zefram Cochrane did indeed shoot Captain Solkar.
ETA:
Looking at
the IaMD title sequence, the first image that we can definitively say is divergent from our history is the shot of an astronaut planting the Terran Empire flag on the Moon. That's a bit hard to pin down the date for, though; the implication is that it's the MU version of the 1969 Moon landing, but the astronaut is wearing a 22nd-century Starfleet EVA suit. It's also a pretty obvious fake, so maybe it represents latter-day Terran Empire propaganda rewriting history.
That also depends on how you interpret the graphic overlays. There is footage from what appears to be World War I, with the image of an army marching as the emblem of the Terran Empire appears over them. That could be interpreted as implying that the Terran Empire, or an ancestral state, existed as early as 1913.
I suppose the question is -- do these images represent an objective, omniscient third-person overview of M.U. Earth history, or do they represent a propagandistic view of history as encouraged by Imperial authorities?
(Which, of course, raises the question -- do the normal intro images in ENT's opening titles represent an objective, omniscient third-person overview of Earth history, or do they represent a propagandistic view of history as encouraged by United Earth authorities?)
Let the MU be closed to omniscient analysis, let it be self-contained until the Defiant appears...
