Duke of Marlborough is a title in the Peerage of England. It was created by Queen Anne in 1702 for John Churchill, 1st Earl of Marlborough (1650–1722), the noted military leader. In historical texts, unqualified use of the title typically refers to the 1st Duke. The name of the dukedom refers to Marlborough in Wiltshire.
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Ideologically an adherent to economic liberalism and imperialism, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. He was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.
General John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, 1st Prince of Mindelheim, 1st Count of Nellenburg, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, was an English soldier and statesman whose career spanned the reigns of five monarchs. From a gentry family, he served first as a page at the court of the House of Stuart under James, Duke of York, through the 1670s and early 1680s, earning military and political advancement through his courage and diplomatic skill.
The Munich Agreement was an agreement concluded at Munich on 30 September 1938, by Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, the French Republic, and Fascist Italy. The agreement provided for the German annexation of part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland, where more than three million people, mainly ethnic Germans, lived. The pact is also known in some areas as the Munich Betrayal, because of a previous 1924 alliance agreement and a 1925 military pact between France and the Czechoslovak Republic.
Appeasement, in an international context, is a diplomatic policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of the British governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy between 1935 and 1939. Under British pressure, appeasement of Nazism and Fascism also played a role in French foreign policy of the period but was always much less popular there than in the United Kingdom.
The European theater of World War II was one of the two main theaters of combat during World War II. It saw heavy fighting across Europe for almost six years, starting with Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and ending with the Western Allies conquering most of Western Europe, the Soviet Union conquering most of Eastern Europe including the German capital Berlin and Germany's unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945 although fighting continued elsewhere in Europe until 25 May. On 5 June 1945, the Berlin Declaration proclaiming the unconditional surrender of Germany to the four victorious powers was signed. The Allied powers fought the Axis powers on two major fronts but there were other fronts varying in scale from the Italian campaign the 3rd largest campaign in Europe to the Polish Campaign as well as in a strategic bombing offensive and in the adjoining Mediterranean and Middle East theater.
The Casablanca Conference or Anfa Conference was held in Casablanca, French Morocco, from January 14 to 24, 1943, to plan the Allied European strategy for the next phase of World War II. The main discussions were between US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Stalin could not attend. Key decisions included a commitment to demand Axis powers' unconditional surrender; plans for an invasion of Sicily and Italy before the main invasion of France; an intensified strategic bombing campaign against Germany; and approval of a US Navy plan to advance on Japan through the central Pacific and the Philippines. The last item authorized the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, which shortened the war. Of all the decisions made, the most important was the invasion of Sicily, which Churchill pushed for in part to divert American attention from opening a second front in France in 1943, a move that he feared would result in very high Allied casualties and not be possible until 1944.
"Never was so much owed by so many to so few" was a wartime speech delivered to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom by British prime minister Winston Churchill on 20 August 1940. The name stems from the specific line in the speech, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few", referring to the ongoing efforts of the Royal Air Force and other Allied aircrew who were fighting in the Battle of Britain, the pivotal air battle with the German Luftwaffe.
Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia is a British popular historian and journalist who serves as a Member of the House of Lords. He is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New-York Historical Society. He was a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 2013 to 2021.
The Gathering Storm is a BBC–HBO co-produced television biographical film about Winston Churchill in the years just prior to World War II. The title of the film is that of the first volume of Churchill's largely autobiographical six-volume history of the war, which covered the period from 1919 to 3 September 1939, the day he became First Lord of the Admiralty.
Sir Horace John Wilson, was a senior British government official who had a key role, as Head of the Home Civil Service, with government of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the appeasement period just prior to the Second World War.
Named the Greatest Briton of all time in a 2002 poll, and widely regarded as being among the most influential people in British history, Winston Churchill has been regularly portrayed in film, television, radio and other media. The depictions range from minor character to the biographical centerpiece, exceeding 30 films, more than two dozen television shows, several stage productions, and countless books.
Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World is a book by Patrick J. Buchanan, published in May 2008. Buchanan argues that both world wars were unnecessary and that the British Empire's decision to join the wars had a cataclysmic effect globally. One of Buchanan's expressed purposes is to undermine what he described as a "Churchill cult" in America's elite. Buchanan focuses particularly on how Winston Churchill helped influence Britain into the world wars with Germany in 1914 and in 1939.
The Battle of Castiglione took place near Castiglione delle Stiviere in Lombardy, Italy on 8 September 1706 during the War of the Spanish Succession. A French army of 12,000 attacked a Hessian corps of 10,000 that was besieging the town and forced them to retreat with heavy losses.
The War That Came Early is a six-novel series by Harry Turtledove depicting an alternate history of World War II. As is typical of Turtledove's alternate histories, the narrative follows a large cast of both fictional and historical characters.
The diplomatic history of World War II includes the major foreign policies and interactions inside the opposing coalitions, the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers, between 1939 and 1945.
The World Crisis is Winston Churchill's account of the First World War, published in six volumes. Published between 1923 and 1931: in many respects it prefigures his better-known multivolume The Second World War. The World Crisis is analytical and, in some parts, a justification by Churchill of his role in the war. Churchill denied it was a "history," describing the work in Vol. 2 as "a contribution to history of which note should be taken together with other accounts."
A Total and Unmitigated Defeat was a speech by Winston Churchill in the House of Commons at Westminster on Wednesday, 5 October 1938, the third day of the Munich Agreement debate. Signed five days earlier by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the agreement met the demands of Nazi Germany in respect of the Czechoslovak region of Sudetenland.
The following events occurred in October 1939:
Winston Churchill retained his UK Parliamentary seat at the 1929 general election as member for Epping, but the Conservative Party was defeated and, with Ramsay MacDonald forming his second Labour government, Churchill was out of office and would remain so until the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939. This period of his life has been dubbed his "wilderness years", but he was extremely active politically as the main opponent of the government's policy of appeasement in the face of increasing German, Italian and Japanese militarism.
