Italian sermons tell a story of the Reformation that credits preachers with using the pulpit, pen, and printing press to keep Italy Catholic when the region’s violent religious wars made the future uncertain, and with fashioning a post-Reformation Catholicism that would survive the competition and religious choice of their own time and ours.

"Africa for the Africans" was the name given in Africa to the extraordinary black social protest movement led by Jamaican Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940). Volumes I-VII of the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers chronicled the Garvey movement that flourished in the United States during the 1920s. Now, the long-awaited African volumes of this edition (Volumes VIII and IX and a forthcoming Volume X) demonstrate clearly the central role Africans played in the development of the Garvey phenomenon. The African volumes provide the first authoritative account of how Africans transformed Garveyism from an external stimulus into an African social movement. They also represent the most extensive collection of documents ever gathered on the early African nationalism of the inter-war period. Here is a detailed chronicle of the spread of Garvey's call for African redemption throughout Africa and the repressive colonial responses it engendered. Volume VIII begins in 1917 with the little-known story of the Pan-African commercial schemes that preceded Garveyism and charts the early African reactions to the UNIA. Volume IX continues the story, documenting the establishment of UNIA chapters throughout Africa and presenting new evidence linking Garveyism and nascent Namibian nationalism.

The fourth volume of the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers marks the period of deepening crisis in the UNIA's political and economic fortunes. After September of 1921, membership declined and morale in the UNIA began to weaken. Underlying it all, however, was the final failure of the Black Star Line that resulted when negotiations with the United States Chipping Board for the purchase of the long proposed African ship collapsed in March 1922. The movement also suffered a major setback when the first Liberian colonization plan aborted in the summer of 1921. On the political front, Garvey's African program had to compete with W.E.B. Du Bois's Second Pan-African Congress. The were also major shifts in Garvey's political strategy during this period, his speeches reflecting a desire to placate the U.S. government, while simultaneously assailing his lef-wing critics for promoting "social equality." This disavowal of radicalism earned him further enemies on the left. One of his chief black critics, Cyril V. Briggs, the leader of the African Blood Brotherhood, unwittingly supplied federal investigators with evidence that led to Garvey's indictment on charges of mail fraud in February 1922. By prosecuting him, however, the Department of Justice did not discredit Garvey in the eyes of his followers; rather, it temporarily strengthened his hold over the movement as the appearance of persecution intensified the loyalty of the UNIA membership. But later in 1922 Garvey did lose favor among many of his followers when it was disclosed that he had met secretly in Atlanta with the Acting Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. What Garvey had thought was a diplomatic triumph proved instead to be anathema to most blacks. At the Third UNIA Convention in 1922, Garvey repudiated the entire executive council of the UNIA, while expressing his anger of "plots" against him from within the UNIA leadership. Loyalty to Garvey thus became a more urgent issue than ever before. But although Garvey was once again able to silence his critics within the UNIA, the price was to be a badly fractured and demoralized movement. At the same time, his political adversaries outside the UNIA were steadily gaining ground against him. As meticulously documented as the three previous volumes, Volume IV provides the first extended record of Garvey's emergent social philosophy, particularly as it relates to his conception of "racial purity" and the metaphysics of the human condition. It stands as an impressive record of the Garvey movement.