''The Armada'' is a popular history by

Garrett Mattingly Garrett Mattingly (May 6, 1900 – December 18, 1962) was a professor of European history at Columbia University who specialized in early modern diplomatic history. In 1960 he won a Pulitzer Prize for '' The Defeat of the Spanish Armada''. Early ...

—a historian who taught at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

—about the attempt of the Spanish Armada to invade England in 1588. It was published in 1959 by Houghton Mifflin Company, and Mattingly won a special Pulitzer Prize for the work in

1960 It is also known as the "Year of Africa" because of major events—particularly the independence of seventeen African nations—that focused global attention on the continent and intensified feelings of Pan-Africanism. Events January * Jan ...

as "a first class history and a literary work of high order.""Special Awards and Citations"
The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2013-12-02. One biographer wrote that ''The Armada'' was "written in purple prose but a royal purple, which read like historical fiction." Another biographer noted that Mattingly "treated his job as that of telling a story about people" and that ''The Armada'' was "that rarity, a book by a professional historian and admired by professional historians which nevertheless became a best seller."J. H. Hexter, ''Doing History'' (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 157, 169. ''The Armada'' remains in print and has also been issued outside the United States under the title ''The Defeat of the Spanish Armada''.

References

1959 non-fiction books 20th-century history books Books about military history History books about England History books about Spain History books about the 16th century Pulitzer Prize-winning works {{Spain-hist-book-stub