Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) was a British statesman of the
Conservative Party who served as Prime Minister from May 1937 to May
1940. He became a Member of Parliament in the 1918 general election. He
was rapidly promoted in 1923 and, after a short-lived Labour-led
government, returned as Minister of Health from 1924 to 1929,
introducing a range of reform measures. He was appointed Chancellor of
the Exchequer in the National Government in 1931. As Prime Minister, he
adopted a foreign policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany, conceding
the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in the Munich
Agreement of September 1938. This policy was widely popular among the
British at the time. On 3 September 1939, as Germany was invading
Poland, the UK declared war on Germany. Chamberlain led Britain through
the first eight months of World War II, but resigned the premiership
after the Allies were forced to retreat from Norway.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Chamberlain>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1190:
Third Crusade: Frederick Barbarossa drowned in the Saleph River
in Anatolia.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_I,_Holy_Roman_Emperor>
1692:
Bridget Bishop became the first person executed for witchcraft
in the Salem witch trials.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridget_Bishop>
1878:
The League of Prizren was officially founded "to struggle in
arms to defend the wholeness of the territories of Albania".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Prizren>
1918:
World War I: Italian torpedo boats sank the Austro-Hungarian
dreadnought SMS Szent István off the Dalmatian coast.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_Szent_Istv%C3%A1n>
2008:
War in Afghanistan: An airstrike by the United States resulted
in the deaths of eleven paramilitary troops of the Pakistan Army
Frontier Corps and eight Taliban fighters in Pakistan's tribal areas.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gora_Prai_airstrike>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
pizzazz:
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pizzazz>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture.
We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our
condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we
find it — the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.
--Saul Bellow
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Saul_Bellow>