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The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True History of the Spanish Armada

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By Neil Hanson

FROM THE COVER: “The Confident Hope of a Miracle is a gripping account of the defeat of the Spanish Armada--the defining international event of the Elizabethan age. In 1588, determined to reclaim England for the Catholic Church, King Philip II of Spain launched a fleet of huge castle-crowned galleons that stretched for miles across the ocean. A battle-hardened Spanish Army waited in Holland, ready to crush England's barely trained conscripts, many armed only with scythes, stakes or longbows. All that stood between Spain and victory was the English Navy. But English ships, tactics, weapons and crews were much superior to those of the Armada, and the pious and ascetic Philip's "confident hope of a miracle" to give him victory was not fulfilled.

The story of the Spanish Armada is one of the great epics, with a cast of characters as rich and varied as any in history, with results that shaped Europe for centuries to come. Neil Hanson, the acclaimed author of The Great Fire of London and The Custom of the Sea, brings the story to vivid life, tracing the origins of the conflict from the Old World to the New, delineating the Armada campaign in rousing prose, and illuminating the lives of kings and popes, spymasters and assassins, military commanders and common sailors, and the ordinary men and women caught up in this great event when the fate of nations hung in the balance. Hanson also depicts the terrible fate that befell the seamen of both sides long after the decisive battles were over, and he takes a fresh, hard look at Elizabeth I, shaking the pedestal of "England's greatest ever monarch."" The Confident Hope of a Miracle is authentic and original history written with the pace and drama of a novel.”

NY. Alfred Knopf. 2005. 528p.

Catherine of Aragon: The Spanish Queen of Henry VIII

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By Giles Tremlett

FROM THE COVER: “The youngest child of the legendary monarchs Ferdinand and Isabel of Spain, Catherine of Aragon (1485-1536) was born to marry for dynastic gain. Endowed with English royal blood on her mother's side, she was betrothed ini infancy to Arthur, Prince of Wales, eldest son of Henry VIl of England, an alliance that greatly benefited both sides. Yet Arthur died weeks after their marriage in 1501, and Catherine found herself remarried to his younger brother, soon to become Henry VIII. The history of England- and indeed of Europe--would be forever altered by their union.

Drawing on his deep knowledge of both Spain and England- -as well as previously untapped Spanish sources- Giles Tremlett has produced the first full biography in more than four decades of the tenacious woman whose marriage to Henry VII lasted twice as long (twenty-four years) as his five other marriages combined. Her refusal to divorce him put her at the center of one of history's greatest power struggles- -Henry's break with the Catholic Church as, wanting a son, he attempted to annul his marriage to Catherine and wed Anne Boleyn. After Catherine's death, her daughter, Mary, would controversially inherit England's throne; briefly and bloodily, she returned the country to the Catholicism of her mother's native Spain, foreshadowing the Spanish Armada some three decades later.”

NY. Walker Publishing. 2010. 445p.

Tudor England

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By S. T. Bindoff

FROM THE PROLOGUE: “The battle was over. On a stretch of high ground in the midland heart of the kingdom twenty thousand men had met in fierce, clumsy combat, and the day had ended in the decisive defeat of the stronger army. Its leader, the King, had been killed fighting heroically, and men had seen his naked corpse slung across his horse's back and borne away to an obscure grave. His captains were dead, captured, or in flight, his troops broken and demoralized. But in the victor's army all was rejoicing. In following the claimant to the throne his supporters had chosen the winning side, and when they saw the golden circlet which had fallen from the King's head placed upon their leader's, their lingering doubts fed before the conviction that God had blessed his cause, and they hailed him joyously as their sovereign.”

London. Penguin. 1969. 323p.

The Life of Elizabeth I

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By Alison Weir

FROM THE PREFACE: “This was never meant to be a political biography, nor did I intend to write a social history of the times. My aim has always been to write a history of Elizabeth's personal life within the framework of her reign, drawing on her own extensive literary remains, as well as those of her contemporaries. The manuscript was originally entitled The Private Life of Elizabeth I, but it very soon became apparent that Elizabeth's 'private' life was a very public one indeed, hence the change of title. Nor is it possible to write a personal history of her without encompassing the political and social events that made up the fabric of her life. What I have tried to do, therefore, is weave into the narrative enough about them to make sense of the story, and emphasise Elizabeth's reaction to them, showing how she influenced the history of her time.”

New York. Ballantine. 1998. 566p.

The Reign Of George III 1760-1815

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BY J.Steven Watson

FROM THE COVER: This new account attempts to weave a consecutive story political, social, anomic and cultural history, making clear their interaction upon each other. In dealing with subjects as diverse as the loss of Amerrica, the winning of supremacy in Indla, the political ideas of Bute, North, and Pitt, with local government and economic changes, as well as with that transformation of men's attitude to life known as Romanticism, it offers an dependent interpretation which takes count of a great body of research upon both sides of the Atlantic.

London. Oxford At The Clarendon Press 1960. 663p.

England in Eighteenth Century (1714-1815)

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By J. H. Plumb

FROM CHAPTER 1: “England in 1714 was a land of hamlets and villages: its towns, such as it had, were on the coast. In Lancashire, the West Riding, and West Midlands towns of some size and substance were beginning to grow, but the majority of the population was still in the south and still rural. Estimates of population vary because the evidence is unreliable. Until the last decades of the century, it is largely a matter of intelligent guesswork. The population was probably, in 1714, about five and a half millions, and from 1714 to 1742, after an initial spurt, there was only avery small increase, but there were important changes in its distribution; East Anglia had a declining population; the West Country and South and East Midlands werefairly static, so was the East Ridinga n d all of the north but Tyneside, West Riding, and South Lan- cashire, where the increase was marked; so, too, was the increase in the West Midlands. Surrey and Middlesex grew with London, whose rapid expansion of the lateseventeenth century was maintained.”

London. Pelican. 1955. 220p.

The Brethren: Inside The Supreme Court

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By Bob Woodward And Scott Armstrong

FROM THE COVER: “"A provocative book about a hallowed institution, the U.S. Supreme Court. . .. It is the most comprehensive inside story ever written of the most important court in the world. For this reason alone it is required reading." Business Week

"It is to the credit of Woodward and Armstrong that they were willing and able to shatter this conspiracy of silence. It is certainly in the highest tradition of investigative journalism to expose the realities of institutions that affect our lives as greatly as the Supreme Court does." SaturdayReview

NY. Avon Books. 1979. 562p.

Shelter from the Storm: Better Options for New York City’s Asylum-Seeker Crisis

By John Ketchamand Daniel Di Martino   

Since the summer of 2022, more than 70,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City, stretching public resources to their limit. The massive influx has been particularly challenging given the city’s “right to shelter,” the result of a 1979 lawsuit, Callahan v. Carey, and corresponding consent decree, which required the city to provide immediate shelter to those who request it, regardless of the number of applicants or the availability of resources. In order to comply with this requirement, the city has housed some 40,000 migrants in shelters—which has led to an approximately 70% spike in the shelter population in a single year. NYC is currently supporting more than 170 emergency shelters and 10 additional large-scale humanitarian relief centers.

Shelters and relief centers simply cannot house all the newly arrived migrants, which has forced the city to procure approximately 4,500 hotel rooms in unionized facilities,[1] often through expensive contracts that provide bonanzas to owners and the city’s hotel-worker unions. Most notably, on May 13, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the historic 1,025-room Roosevelt Hotel, located in the heart of Midtown East, would become New York City’s central migrant intake center,[2] at a reported cost of $225 million.[3] In addition to hosting hundreds of families and individuals on-site, the location will process all arriving asylum seekers and provide them with a range of city services, including government-issued ID cards, public-school and health-insurance enrollment, mental-health counseling, and more.

New York: Manhattan Institute, 2023. 19p.

Labor Recruitment and Human Trafficking: Analysis of a Global Trafficking Survivor Database

By Camilla Fabbri https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4692-9646 camilla.fabbri@lshtm.ac.ukHeidi Stöckl, […], and Cathy Zimmerman

Over the past decade, third-party labor recruiters who facilitate employment for migrant workers across low- and middle-income countries have often been considered by the counter-trafficking community as one of the main entry points into human trafficking. In response, anti-trafficking prevention programs have increasingly focused on addressing exploitative recruitment in migrants’ origin countries. Such programs may advocate for increased regulation of migration, greater enforcement actions against unlicensed recruiters, stricter ethical codes of conduct for recruiters and employers, and more pre-departure information about recruitment for migrants. Yet, there remains limited research about the relationship between prospective migrants, recruiters, and human trafficking, and the relative importance of third-party recruitment in the trafficking process. This Research Note draws on the world's largest database of individual victims of trafficking cases, the International Organization for Migration's (IOM) Global Victim of Trafficking Database (VoTD), to examine the role and characteristics of recruitment of trafficked victims. The VoTD contains information on nearly 50,000 trafficking victims who were registered for assistance from 2002 to June 2018. Our analysis shows that 94 percent of trafficked victims were recruited, in a broad sense (i.e., not only by third-party intermediaries). Additionally, the data presented here suggest that the relationship between recruitment and trafficking is complex and that forced labor is embedded within the wider structural issues around low-wage labor migration that lead to exploitative work conditions. Interventions to address human trafficking will benefit from strategies that target systemic issues constraining or harming low-wage labor. Further, these findings highlight the value of large-scale administrative datasets in migration research

  International Migration Review 2023, Vol. 57(2) 629-651  

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Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement

By Alexander Betts

Such threats as environmental change, food insecurity, and generalized violence force massive numbers of people to flee states that are unable or unwilling to ensure their basic rights, as do conditions in failed and fragile states that make possible human rights deprivations. Because these reasons do not meet the legal understanding of persecution, the victims of these circumstances are not usually recognized as "refugees," preventing current institutions from ensuring their protection. In this book, Alexander Betts develops the concept of "survival migration" to highlight the crisis in which these people find themselves.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Pres, 2013. 255p.

The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives

Edited by Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Vinh Nguyen

This Handbook presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives, broadly defined. Interrogating who can be considered a refugee and what constitutes a narrative, the thirty-eight chapters included in this collection encompass a range of forcibly displaced subjects, a mix of geographical and historical contexts, and a variety of storytelling modalities. Analyzing novels, poetry, memoirs, comics, films, photography, music, social media, data, graffiti, letters, reports, eco-design, video games, archival remnants, and ethnography, the individual chapters counter dominant representations of refugees as voiceless victims. Addressing key characteristics and thematics of refugee narratives, this Handbook examines how refugee cultural productions are shaped by and in turn shape socio-political landscapes. It will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners committed to engaging refugee narratives in the contemporary moment.

London; New York: Routledge, 2023. 528p. 

Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959: A Forty Years' Crisis?

Edited by Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch  

 Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959 offers a new history of Europe’s mid-20th century as seen through its recurrent refugee crises. By bringing together in one volume recent research on a range of different contexts of groups of refugees and refugee policy, it sheds light on the common assumptions that underpinned the history of refugees throughout the period under review. The essays foreground the period between the end of the First World War, which inaugurated a series of new international structures to deal with displaced populations, and the late 1950s, when Europe's home-grown refugee problems had supposedly been ‘solved’ and attention shifted from the identification of an exclusively European refugee problem to a global one. Borrowing from E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, first published in 1939, the editors of this volume test the idea that the two post-war eras could be represented as a single crisis of a European-dominated international order of nation states in the face of successive refugee crises which were both the direct consequence of that system and a challenge to it. Each of the chapters reflects on the utility and limitations of this notion of a ‘forty years’ crisis’ for understanding the development of specific national and international responses to refugees in the mid-20th century. Contributors to the volume also provide alternative readings of the history of an international refugee regime, in which the non-European and colonial world are assigned a central role in the narrative.

London; New York : Bloomsburgy Academic, 2017. 269p.

American Sociology and Holocaust Studies: The Alleged Silence and the Creation of the Sociological Delay

By Adele Valeria Messina

Filled with new elements that challenge common scholarly theses, this book acquaints the reader with the “Jewish problem” of sociology and provides what this academic discipline urgently needs: a one-volume history of the Sociology of the Holocaust. The story of why and how sociologists as well as the schools of sociological thought came to confront the Holocaust has never been entirely told. The volume offers original insights on the nature of American sociology with implications for the post-Holocaust sociology development.

Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017. 498p.

Recovering Identity: Criminalized Women’s Fight for Dignity and Freedom

By Cesraéa Rumpf

Recovering Identity examines a critical tension in criminalized women’s identity work. Through in-depth qualitative and photo-elicitation interviews, Cesraéa Rumpf shows how formerly incarcerated women engaged recovery and faith-based discourses to craft rehabilitated identities, defined in opposition to past identities as “criminal-addicts.” While these discourses made it possible for women to carve out spaces of personal protection, growth, and joy, they also promoted individualistic understandings of criminalization and the violence and dehumanization that followed. Honoring criminalized women’s stories of personal transformation, Rumpf nevertheless strongly critiques institutions’ promotion of narratives that impose lifelong moral judgment while detracting attention from the structural forces of racism, sexism, and poverty that contribute to women’s vulnerability to violence.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023. 234p

The Church and the Age of Reason 1648-1789

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By Gerald R. Cragg

FROM THE PREFACE: “This span in the history of the Christian church stretches from the age of religious and civil strife which existed before the middle of the seventeenth century to the age of industrialism and republicanism which followed the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic wars. The church in general, reacting strongly against the turbulences of the Civil War and the Thirty Years' War, placed a premium on order, moderation, and stability. Movements suspected of enthusiasm, such as Puritanism, Quietism, and Jansenism, fell into disrepute, and the authority exercised by the state in religious affairs became more pronounced. It was an age dominated by Reason, which, until it provoked a reaction in such movements as Pietism and Evangelicism, posed a formidable challenge to Christianity.”

London. Penguin. 1960. 297p.

Documents Of The Christian Church

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Selected and Edited by Henry Bettenson

FROM THE COVER FLAP: This book presents a selection from the most important records of the history of the Christian Church from its beginning. It goes in all cases to official documents and other sources, and provides the general reader with many extracts, about most of which he may have heard, though he will have seen very few and will certainly not have them conveniently to his hand in one volume. The book opens with references to Christianity in the Classical authors, and continues with, among other subjects, the Relation of Church and State in the Roman Empire, the Formation of the Creeds, the Development of Doctrine, the Breach between East and West, the Empire and the Papacy, the Relations between Church and State….”

London. Oxford University Press. 1959. 479p.

Oliver Cromwell And The Rule Of The Puritans In England

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By Sir Charles Firth

FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY G. M. YOUNG: “…If Cromwell had been allowed by the army to take the crown, it is well within conjecture that the nobility and gentry would have accepted the accomplished fact, seeing in it the return after those years of travail to stability and security. But the army would not allow it. A Head of the Commonwealth, a Protector---yes. But the step from Highness to Majesty -no…”

London. Oxford University Press. 1956. 516p

England In The Nineteenth Century (1815-1914)

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By David Thomson

FROM THE PREFACE: “This book is not an attempt to write what is often called a 'general' or 'undifferentiated' history ofnineteenth-century England. Still less is it intended as yet another 'text-book' on nineteenth-century England. These tasks have been well performed already. In conformity with the taste and tendency of our times I have tried rather to describe, and as far as possible to explain, the major social changes which the people of England experienced during that remarkable century between 1815 and 1914 which might well be called 'the Great Peace'. In making this attempt we have to draw upon political, economic, intellectual, diplomatic, and any other sort of 'differentiated' or 'specialized' history available to us…”

London. Penguin. 1955. 256p.

England In The Seventeenth Century

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By Maurice Ashley

FROM CHAPTER 1: “King James VI of Scotland, whom one of his Presbyterian subjects had addressed as "God's Silly Vassal' and a contemporary French statesman was to call the wisest fool in Christendom', left Edinburgh on 5 April 1603 for Westminster, to be crowned King of England in succession to Queen Elizabeth I. He had long been eager for this fine heritage- so eager that when his mother, the attractive but foolish Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, exiled in a foreign land, had been faced with execution at the prayer of the English parliament, he had contented himself with restrained protests. After all he had owed nothing to his mother but his existence. ..”

London. Penguin. 1968. 267p.