During the past three decades, the international lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights movement has made significant advances in securing legal protections and rights. However, millions of LGBT people continue to live in fear in nations where homosexuality remains illegal In The International LGBT Rights Movement, Laura Belmonte offers a comprehensive account of this global force, from its origins in the early 1970s to its crucial place in world affairs today. Belmonte examines the movement's goals, the disputes about its mission, and its rise to international importance. The International LGBT Rights Movement provides a thorough introduction to the movement's history, highlighting the key figures, controversies, and organizations, including Amnesty International and the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Commission. The book is global in scope and integrates both state and non-state actors to explore transnational attempts to challenge homophobia and to assess both the successes and failures of such efforts.

During the past four decades, the international lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights movement has made significant advances, but millions of LGBT people continue to live in fear in nations where homosexuality remains illegal. The International LGBT Rights Movement offers a comprehensive account of this global force, from its origins in the mid-nineteenth century to its crucial place in world affairs today. Belmonte examines the movement's goals, the disputes about its mission, and its rise to international importance. The International LGBT Rights Movement provides a thorough introduction to the movement's history, highlighting key figures, controversies, and organizations. With a global scope that considers both state and non-state actors, the book explores transnational movements to challenge homophobia, while also assessing the successes and failures of these efforts along the way.

In 1955, the United States Information Agency published a lavishly illustrated booklet called "My America." Assembled ostensibly to document "the basic elements of a free dynamic society," the booklet emphasized cultural diversity, political freedom, and social mobility and made no mention of McCarthyism or the Cold War. Though hyperbolic, "My America" was, as Laura A. Belmonte shows, merely one of hundreds of pamphlets from this era written and distributed in an organized attempt to forge a collective defense of the "American way of life.""Selling the American Way" examines the context, content, and reception of U.S. propaganda during the early Cold War. Determined to protect democratic capitalism and undercut communism, U.S. information experts defined the national interest not only in geopolitical, economic, and military terms. Through radio shows, films, and publications, they also propagated a carefully constructed cultural narrative of freedom, progress, and abundance as a means of protecting national security. Not simply a one-way look at propaganda as it is produced, the book is a subtle investigation of how U.S. propaganda was received abroad and at home and how criticism of it by Congress and successive presidential administrations contributed to its modification.