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With her latest book, Jordanna Bailkin makes a singularly impressive contribution to 20th-century British history. Her focus is on the various sites that were built or, more commonly, re-purposed to hold refugees who reached Britain at various stages in the 20th century. Her wide-ranging approach allows her to cast fresh light on fairly familiar episodes, such as the arrival of Jewish and Basque refugees in the late 1930s, Hungarian refugees in 1956 and Ugandan Asians in the 1970s, but also to cover groups whose arrival in Britain is much less well known, such as Belgian refugees during the First World War, Anglo-Egyptians in the wake of the Suez crisis in 1956, and Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s. (However, she does not discuss Bosnian Muslim refugees in the 1990s.) Some of these episodes have been the subject of specialist study, much of it very recent.[1] But, as we shall see, there is much to be gained from bringing these episodes within a single frame.

Spanish Ministry of Defence, 2011).It sheds new light on an obscure, but fundamental, episode of the undeclared Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604) that took place a year after the Spanish Armada.Interestingly, although Queen Elizabeth I was at first intentionally misinformed about this, once she knew the grim reality, she silenced it.The Queen prohibited any publication about the English Armada (also known as the Counter-Armada or Drake-Norris expedition) trying, successfully, to hide the disastrous result suffered by the English in that military campaign on the Iberian mainland.Only a few propaganda pamphlets were published in order to hide the truth, treating real but unfavorable facts as false rumors and instead showing a false aftermath of the campaign favorable to the English.According to the author, these pamphlets -the first by Anthony Wingfield (1) -were taken for reliable sources by British historians.Gorrochategui's thesis is that little attention has been paid to the Counter-Armada by historians, particularly in the English-speaking world.The author contrasts this fact with the vast literature produced on the Spanish Armada.There are a few exceptions: for instance, the British Hispanist Martin A. S. Hume (2) dedicated a full chapter to the Counter-

The 1911 Revolution overthrew Manchu rule, ushering in the Republican era in China.As Xiaowei Zheng indicates at the beginning of this book, the traditional historiography on the 1911 Revolution focuses largely on the political dimension.Some stress the role of the Tongmenghui, the predecessor of the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party), in launching the revolution, while Marxist historians have tended to explain it as a bourgeois revolution against the feudal rule of the Qing dynasty.Another approach positions the revolution in the framework of social history, examining how political elites redefined the relations between the central and local governments.The third perspective draws on modernisation theory, regarding the revolution as an attempt to build a modern nation-state.However, none of these studies have discussed in detail the significance of ideas and culture in mobilising the masses and shaping the path of the revolution, and Zheng's monograph is therefore a timely intervention to complement and transcend the existing literature.

In popular and academic discourse, the American Civil War has never really ended in the United States.For the first century or so after the resolution of the military conflict, most white Americans, including historians shaped by the resurrection of white supremacy, factored slavery as being somewhere between a negligible factor to one of many contributory variables that eventually pushed the nation to war.During the United States' Civil Rights era, as the American academic community began to more closely scrutinize its own racist proclivities, scholarship improved in both depth and breadth.The resulting work made plain that slavery was not solely one of many causal factors, but it was the cause -virtually everything that divided the North and the South to the point of war stemmed from slavery and debates about slavery.

There are few historical events with a cultural legacy as enduring as that connected to the Second World War. The conflict occupies an important place within many personal, as well as national, narratives. Those interested in its history and heritage are confronted by an enormous range of writing, on a wide variety of themes. The problem, according to Jan Black, a 94-year-old RAF veteran quoted on the first page of Wendy Webster's Mixing It: Diversity in World War Two Britain, is that 'people just don't know their history' (p. 3).