Lady Selina Shirley was the daughter of Washington Shirley, second earl Ferrers; she married Theophilus Hastings, ninth earl of Huntingdon. As Selina, countess of Huntingdon, she became the patroness of the evangelicals in - and out - of the Church of England, including the early Methodists in England, Wales, and America alike. And she had a distant cousin in America: George Washington, to whom she decided to write about her plans for a mission to the Native Americans and the settling of her congregants on the frontier. In the midst of revolution, war, peace treaties, reprisals, and the birth of a new nation, the Countess and the General shared first a correspondent, in Phillis Wheatley, America's first Black author and poet; then, a correspondence; and eventually, a friendship and something of a vision. The Countess entrusted to her distant cousin the General her hopes of maintaining charities in the former colonies, settling the back-country with pious families, and evangelizing the Native Americans. The General came to endow what became Washington College - now Washington & Lee University - where one of America's first Black clergymen was educated, and to move towards abolitionism. Their lives and correspondence, and their actions, touched at various points those of John Wesley and George Whitefield; Phillis Wheatley; Olaudah Equiano the Black British writer whose voice powerfully indicted slavery; the Reverend Samson Occom, the Mohegan evangelist; and Granville Sharp, the pro-American British civil servant who midwifed abolitionism and helped create Sierra Leone. In the end, they helped to create the forces that evangelized the American frontier, put down slavery, gave the United States its standing sense of a special moral mission in the world, and made the Nonconformist Conscience a permanent factor in British politics.

Here are collected some of Bapton Books' position papers from the past three years, and other critical writings by Mr Pyle and Mr Wemyss. Provocative - not to say, provoking - and all too often prescient, these papers detail the dirty work at the crossroads where the culture, law, politics, and policy intersect. We live in a time in which 'advocacy' and indeed democratic politics are far too regularly degenerating into objective fascism; in which liberty is under assault at home; and in which quite evident fascists and tyrants abroad are on the march. There is a remedy: the full-throated defence of freedom, by all of us, together, on all sides of all issues. You may find the prescription - the mixture as before - in these pages. Bapton Books Position Papers aim to inform, to question, to educate, to assert, to challenge, to analyse, and, always, to spark debate. They are made available to the reading public and to all who are intelligently interested in the affairs of the day.

It was the year of Amelia Earhart's disappearance, the destruction of Guernica from the air, the New London School Explosion, and the Hindenburg disaster. The Ohio River and the Lower Mississippi flooded. The recovery of 1936 plummeted into the Recession of 1937 - 1938. Churchill was in the political wilderness; FDR thwarted himself by overreach, raising a bipartisan conservative coalition against him in Congress; Stanley Baldwin left Downing Street in favour of his chosen successor, Neville Chamberlain. The duke of Windsor married Mrs Simpson; the coronation went ahead, with a different monarch: George 6th. Stalin carried on with purge and show-trial. Japan renewed hostilities in China. Italy committed genocide and war crimes in Abyssinia; the Third Reich continued its blind career towards destruction. Dowding and Pile were determining that - whatever Baldwin had said - the bomber should not, actually, always get through: not through ack-ack, not through fighter screens, and above all not through radar. George C Marshall was keeping an eye on rising stars: Ike; Patton; Bradley. Sam Rayburn was Majority Leader of the House; Lyndon Johnson entered Congress; Harry S Truman was midway through his first, undistinguished Senate term. Bohr and Teller were looking into arcane mysteries; Hayek and Coase were making sense of the economic shambles; Wittgenstein threw away all his previous conclusions and began afresh, wrestling with language and meaning. Eliot was hearing the first premonitory whispers of four quartets in scansion, beyond Burnt Norton; Auden, the echoes of the Viking sagas. The future and the past were interpenetrate: time present and time past.... Men sought the mastery of Nature, from the flooded Ohio to the new Golden Gate Bridge, and courted the Nemesis that on bold hubris waits; others quested after authenticity. By the end of the year, Walt Disney had recreated an old story as the first feature-length animated film: that of Snow White; Carl Orff had rescued old tavern songs of Fortune's Wheel; and an obscure Oxford philologist had made new myth, from a hole in the ground where dwelt a hobbit. 1937 was a year of portent. Now its story is told, by the authors of the celebrated centenary history of the US and UK Titanic Enquiries, hailed by the "Daily Telegraph"'s James Delingpole as a 'cool reassessment' and by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Paris contributing correspondent of the "Sunday Telegraph, " as ' a] sharply and eruditely-drawn account.... A] vivid reconstruction and analysis ... a parliamentary procedural as well as the re-creation of a vanished pre-War world'. Markham Shaw Pyle is the historian of how, in 1941, four scant months before Pearl Harbor, the US Congress kept the draft - by one vote; GMW Wemyss, the chronicler of those three days in May 1940 during which Chamberlain was toppled and Churchill raised to the premiership just as Hitler began his invasion of France. In this sweeping history of a portentous year, they once more range from intellectual history to the fields of battle, from flooded farms to the halls of Congress and the Palace of Westminster, illuminating great and little alike. This is at once history in the grand manner, and history from the ground up: from nuts and bolts and poets' insights, to secret diplomacy, the mysteries of physics, the warfare in the human heart, and moments of high tragedy and unconquered hope.

This is the story of America on August 12, 1941, four months before Pearl Harbor. Isolationism was still strong, FDR was hammering out the Atlantic Charter with Churchill (to the fury of America Firsters), the Japanese were ready to kick off a war, most Americans were more interested in baseball and radio shows than in a distant conflict, and Congress decided to keep the draft - by one vote. Markham Shaw Pyle's snapshot of America on a day more fateful than any then knew is the counterpart to GMW Wemyss' "The Confidence of the House: May 1940, " also available from Bapton Books. It is the story of farmers and bigleague ballplayers, spies, editors, whores, Congressmen, housewives, and disgruntled draftees; of events in Europe, massacres in China, and Japanese war plans; and of "Mister Sam," House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, trying to get the draft extension through, come Hell or high water. From border radio stations to Ebbets Field, from Congress to cruisers at sea; from Maine to Texas, Hatteras to the Golden Gate and far Hawaii, this is the rough music of America's serenade by destiny.

Rudyard Kipling's tales of Mowgli, the Man-cub, raised by wolves, are not for children only. They have never been out of print, and they have shaped the English language and the British (and American) psyche to an extraordinary degree. The stories that concern Mowgli's adventures, from his adoption by Mother and Father Wolf to his marriage and taking service in the Indian Forestry as an adult, have been collected, placed in their internal chronological order, and annotated in this volume by the historians GMW Wemyss and Markham Shaw Pyle, the celebrated chroniclers of the Titanic enquiries, the rise of Churchill, and how the US Congress, four months before Pearl Harbor, kept the draft - by one vote. As in their previous noted annotation of "The Wind in the Willows," Mr Wemyss and Mr Pyle, the first a British historian, the second, an American historian, have ranged widely in annotating this classic work. It is prefaced with essays on imperialism, dryland farming, the climate and geography of Madhya Pradesh, Kipling's tribalism and his opposition to the Kaiser's nascent imperial adventurism, and the image of the Mother-figure. Over 350 footnotes accompany the text in this second edition, delving into ecology; irrigation; literary echoes from Bunyan, the Authorised Version, Milton, Blake, Chaucer, and Shakespeare; Kipling's literary influence upon Tolkien and Lewis; wergild; snake-cults and Greek oracles; ethnology; mana and tapu; Anglo-German and Anglo-Russian relations; forestry; and any number of subjects with these, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and All. They have given a new generation the knowledge that the initial Victorian and Edwardian reader should have had ... and much more. If you wish to enjoy these tales with deeper understanding; if you wonder what Buldeo has to do with Mr Sherlock Holmes' antagonist Dr Roylott; if you have ever wondered just why a Gond hunter reminds you of the frontman of Jethro Tull; or if you simply want a cracking good read of stories you but half-remember: here is your book.

The classic tales of the Middle Thames, of the River Bank, the Wild Wood, Ratty, Mole, Mr Badger, and the incorrigible Toad, have been cherished by children and wise adults for generations. Amongst those who cherish them are Bapton Books' partners, GMW Wemyss, historian and West Country essayist, and American historian Markham Shaw Pyle. The noted annotators of Kipling, and acclaimed for their histories of 1912, 1940, and 1941, Mr Pyle and Mr Wemyss here expand and re-issue their classic annotated version of Grahame, with some 345 footnotes that explain the Edwardian scene, canals, rural JPs and Toad's motoring offences, the sad fate of Kenneth Grahame's son, class issues in the Wild Wood, and Classical mythology. With their sense of history and landscape, their love of this book of both their childhoods, and an eye for literary cross-references, Mr Wemyss and Mr Pyle range from the Psalter and the Book of Common Prayer to the Sacred Canon of Sherlock Holmes, from Eliot to Tolkien, Gissing to Betjeman, Kipling to Aristotle, in giving this classic new depth and resonance. Even if you have never wondered just which canal Toad was thrown into, or why Toad's trial is only the second funniest in English literature, this annotated edition will deepen and enrich your reading of these inimitable stories. Adults and sensible children - or, rather, children and sensible adults - will rejoice anew in them.

RMS "Titanic" sank in 1912, a US presidential election year; and in the very first days of the great House of Commons debate on Home Rule for Ireland. The Marconi companies were heroes to the press and the public, who credited them with saving the lives that were saved; JP Morgan, who owned the shipping trust that controlled Titanic's White Star Line, was a major political target for the trust-busters. And members of the British Cabinet, including the Attorney-General who was to direct (and nobble) the Crown's case in the Titanic enquiry, were up to their necks in inside trading in Marconi shares. This is the story of how, in Titanic's loss, 1500 souls were sacrificed to the 'settled science' and 'scientific consensus' of marine engineering. It is also the story of how the US and British loss enquiries were shaped by party politics, corrupted by corrupt politicians and the Marconi Scandal, tainted by the politics of Irish Home Rule, and - finally - salvaged by Oliver Wendell Holmes and the US Supreme Court, and by Lord Mersey's judgement in the Board of Trade Enquiry and the subsequent International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea. Titanic sank a century ago; but she sails on, the ghost ship of modern law and politics, shaping our world in ways we don't notice. This is that story, told by the historians of Churchill's vindication in May 1940 and of how Congress, four months before Pearl Harbor, kept America's armed services ready for war, by a margin of one vote. Advance praise for "When That Great Ship Went Down: " 'What sank the Titanic? Its builders' belief that, when it came to building ships, "the Science Was Settled." And, as this cool reassessment of the US and British Titanic enquiries shows, politicians and regulators in 1912 were just as bad as the current lot: they had a progressive political narrative to push, and their own secrets to hide. Sounds familiar.' - James Delingpole, "Daily Telegraph" columnist, 2010 winner of the Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism, and author of, most recently, "Watermelons: The Green Movement's True Colours" 'In this sharply and eruditely-drawn account of the Titanic Inquiries on either side of the Atlantic, the authors warn: "What lessons this may hold for Mr Cameron and Mr Salmond is beyond the scope of this work." Fortunately, their vivid reconstruction and analysis enable us to draw plenty of damning parallels. This is a parliamentary procedural as well as the re-creation of a vanished pre-War world; its political and intellectual processes as well as a sociology ranging from Trollope to Joyce. This is far more than another clever "Titanic" book.' - Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Paris Contributing Columnist, "The Sunday Telegraph"