What happened
Britain, France, Italy, and Germany reached an agreement at Munich that forced Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany without Czechoslovak participation in the negotiations.
Why it matters
Munich is the most famous shorthand for appeasement, but its deeper importance lies in what it revealed: the unwillingness and incapacity of the major democracies to stop revisionist expansion before war became unavoidable.
Notes
Churchill matters here as a major critic of the agreement even though he was not one of its signatories.