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Presenting a portrait of engaged, activist lives in the 1930s, From Scottsboro to Munich follows a global network of individuals and organizations that posed challenges to the racism and colonialism of the era. Susan Pennybacker positions race at the center of the British, imperial, and transatlantic political culture of the 1930s--from Jim Crow, to imperial London, to the events leading to the Munich Crisis--offering a provocative new understanding of the conflicts, politics, and solidarities of the years leading to World War II.

This book provides a critical introduction to the full range of Williams' work - fiction and non-fiction. It assesses the significance of his contribution in understanding culture, politics and society. Fair-minded, accurate and sensitive, the book makes crucial connections between the different aspects of Williams' work and the underlying concern for a democratic polity which informed it.

What is the state? The State of Freedom offers an important new take on this classic question by exploring what exactly the state did and how it worked. Patrick Joyce asks us to re-examine the ordinary things of the British state from dusty government files and post offices to well-thumbed primers in ancient Greek and Latin and the classrooms and dormitories of public schools and Oxbridge colleges. This is also a history of the 'who' and the 'where' of the state, of the people who ran the state, the government offices they sat in and the college halls they dined in. Patrick Joyce argues that only by considering these things, people and places can we really understand the nature of the modern state. This is both a pioneering new approach to political history in which social and material factors are centre stage, and a highly original history of modern Britain.

In the first three decades of the 20th century, two groups of radical political theorists — one British and one American — were bound together in a unique ideological relationship. This book provides an examination of the intellectual dialogue that constituted that bond. Drawing on archival research, and employing methods of conceptual analysis, it examines the efforts of these two initially distinctive political movements to forge a single ideology capable of motivating far-reaching reform in both of their countries. In so doing, the book emphasizes the exceptional development of American progressivism and British socialism, arguing that the intellectual inspirations and political programmes of both movements were constantly shaped and reshaped by international ideological exchange. It analyses the complex political demands of these movements and enables the works of their leading protagonists, including G. D. H. Cole, Herbert Croly, Harold Laski, and Walter Lippmann, to emerge as significant contributions to modern political thought.

The British empire was a huge enterprise. To foreigners, it more or less defined Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its repercussions in the wider world are still with us today. It also had a great impact on Britain herself: for example, on her economy, security, population, and eating habits. One might expect this to have been reflected in her society and culture. Indeed, this has now become the conventional wisdom: that Britain was steeped in imperialism domestically, which affected (or infected) almost everything Britons thought, felt, and did. This book examines this assumption critically against the broader background of contemporary British society. It argues that the empire had a far lower profile in Britain than it did abroad. Although Britain was an imperial nation in this period, she was never a genuine imperial society. As well as showing how this was possible, the book also discusses the implications of this attitude for Britain and her empire, and for the relationship between culture and imperialism more generally, bringing his study up to date by including the case of the present-day United States.

This book, the sequel to Classes and Cultures, is a historical reinterpretation of British politics in the first decades of universal suffrage. It reveals how the British democratic system developed and more importantly, it challenges its success and suggests reasons why it is flawed. The book targets significant questions, such as what it means to be a democratic society and to what extent voters really make up their own minds on politics. Exploring the political culture of these extraordinary years, the author shows that class difference became one of the principal determinants of political behaviour. It argues that the kind of democracy that emerged in Britain was far from inevitable, was as much historical accident as design, and was in many ways highly flawed.

Was the British empire given away in a fit of collective indifference as many have claimed? Englishness and Empire looks at connections between stories of nation and empire told in the media - the Second World War, the Coronation and Everest, colonial wars of the 1950s, immigration, Winston Churchill's funeral - and makes an important and origi.

Between 1918 and 1939, 448 men who performed uniformed service in the First World War became Conservative MPs. This relatively high-profile cohort have been under-explored as a distinct body, yet a study of their experiences of the war and the ways in which they - and the Conservative Party - represented those experiences to the voting public reveals much about the political culture of Interwar Britain and the use of the Great War as political capital. Radicalised ex-servicemen have, thus far, been considered a rather continental phenomenon historiographically. And whilst attitudes to Hitler and Mussolini form part of this analysis, the study also explores why there were fewer such types in Britain. The Conservative Party, it will be shown, played a crucial part in such a process - with British politics serving as a contested space for survivors' interpretations of what the war should mean.

This lively and engaging cultural history explores a series of interrelated questions about the U.S.'s influence on British society in the years following World War II. How was American culture disseminated into Britain? Why did large sections of British society embrace American customs? What picture did British citizens form of American society and politics? And how did the Cold War's end and the September 11 attacks affect that picture? Here, author John F. Lyons draws on cinema, literature, contemporary journalism, unpublished oral interviews, and a host of other sources to explore not only the ways in which American society impacted Britain, but the ways in which America's complex identity was refracted in the minds of the citizens of its closest ally.

The diplomatic \"special relationship\" between the US and UK has received much attention from historians, while their shared history of racial inequality and civil rights struggles have been relatively understudied. This collection explores this other \"special relationship,\" expanding our historical understanding of the global civil rights movement.