The Campaign Builder's Guild

I'm currently on an idea of making a fantasy setting using our modern time (well, more like the 90s) mixed with various copies of other periods in human history.  I tend to think of it like making a generic fantasy setting for someone in the far future.  Now I'm not really the sort of person who likes to do this as a serious thought-experiment, so I'm not really trying to channel a future so much as just blend history into a fun slurry.  But I think it's an interesting idea (or maybe just a fun idea) so I'm posting the question out here in case it tickles anyone else's imagination:

If you got to combine elements of recent (say, the last 3-4 centuries) history into a fictional fantasy setting what would you put in and how would it come out?

I was also messing with an idea at one point for a humorous campaign where every country would essentially take the best part of its history and add some stuff to it. Mesoamerica would be full of aztecs and mayans, USA had capitalist gangsters and freelancing gunslinger-cowboys, Italy had papally-controlled legionnaires, the mongols pillaged, the russians had a tsar, and there was something odd about Greenland...

This is fairly typical of the urban-legends-are-real kind of fantasy.  Of course, you'd then be incorporating a bunch of new-agery pseudoscience too, I suppose, and calling that real as well.  Phrenology, homeopathy, 'the secret'- those kinds of things.