A reexamination of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy, this study challenges prevailing images of Chamberlain as a tragic hero—a man of peace, naively impressed by the dictators, who did his best under difficult circumstances to prepare his country for war. Instead, the author suggests that Chamberlain dominated his government and demonstrated an uncanny ability to manipulate those around him in support of his own personal vision of Britain's national interest. The failure to rearm to a level consistent with imperial obligations presented a formidable problem. The British Government admittedly had no good option available to it; however, Chamberlain was prepared to endure the humiliating consequences of appeasement, even if it meant peace at any price. He did so for personal, political, and prejudicial reasons. Ruggiero argues that, without Chamberlain, British rearmament would have taken a new direction, and such action might have prevented World War II. Relying primarily upon the Chamberlain Papers and Cabinet Records, this account details how and why Chamberlain adopted his chosen course of action, even after all support for his policies fell away as a result of the Munich Crisis. Most studies have concentrated directly on Chamberlain's appeasement policy, and this is the only one that analyzes his role in the rearmament program at length. It also sheds new light on appeasement by illustrating the connection between the policy and Britain's attempts to rearm.

Outside of major metropolitan areas, the fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights has had its own unique and rich history—one that is quite different from the national narrative set in New York and California. Out in Central Pennsylvania highlights one facet of this lesser-known but equally important story, immersing readers in the LGBTQ community building and social networking that has taken place in the small cities and towns in the heart of Pennsylvania from the 1960s to the present day. Drawing from oral histories and the archives of the LGBT Center of Central PA History Project, this book recounts the innovative ways that LGBTQ central Pennsylvanians organized to demand civil rights and to improve their quality of life in a region that often rejected them. Full of compelling stories of individuals seeking community and grappling with inequity, harassment, and discrimination, and featuring a distinctive trove of historical photographs, Out in Central Pennsylvania is a local story with national implications. It brings rural and small-town queer life out into the open and explores how LGBTQ identity and social advocacy networks can form outside of a large urban environment.

A powerful new account of what a group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American activists, intellectuals, and artists can teach us about democracy Could the African American political tradition save American democracy? African Americans have had every reason to reject America’s democratic experiment. Yet African American activists, intellectuals, and artists who have sought to transform the United States into a racially just society have put forward some of the most original and powerful ideas about how to make America live up to its democratic ideals. In The Darkened Light of Faith, Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition—a tradition that is urgently needed today. The book reexamines how figures as diverse as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin thought about the politics, people, character, and culture of a society that so often dominated them. Sharing a light of faith darkened but not extinguished by the tragic legacy of slavery, they resisted the conclusion that America would always be committed to white supremacy. They believed that democracy is always in the process of becoming and that they could use it to reimagine society. But they also saw that achieving racial justice wouldn’t absolve us of the darkest features of our shared past, and that democracy must be measured by how skillfully we confront a history that will forever remain with us. An ambitious account of the profound ways African Americans have reimagined democracy, The Darkened Light of Faith offers invaluable lessons about how to grapple with racial injustice and make democracy work.

This study focuses on Protestant philanthropic agencies - Calvinist conservatives and social liberals - as competing colour-conscious clerical classes of charioteers driving chariots of charity... behind the Cotton Curtain.