Operation Legacy to avoid records on colonial rule to fall into hands of countries declaring independence from Britain and scrutiny of the British state. Chinese book burning The Burning of books and burying of scholars (), or "Fires of Qin", refers to the burning of writings and slaughter of scholars during the Qin Dynasty of Ancient China, between the period of 213 and 210 BC. "Books" at this point refers to writings on bamboo strips, which were then bound together. The exact extent of the damage is hard to assess; technological books were to be spared and even the "objectionable" books, poetry and philosophy in particular, were preserved in imperial archives and allowed to be kept by the official scholar. United States history Confederate revisionism The historical negationism of American Civil War revisionists and Neo-Confederates claims that the Confederate States (1861–65) were the defenders rather than the instigators of the American Civil War, and that the Confederacy's motivation for secession from the United States was the maintenance of the Southern states' rights and limited government, rather than the preservation and expansion of chattel slavery. Regarding Neo-Confederate revisionism of the U.S. Civil War, the historian Brooks D. Simpson says: "This is an active attempt to reshape historical memory, an effort by white Southerners to find historical justifications for present-day actions. The neo–Confederate movement's ideologues have grasped that if they control how people remember the past, they'll control how people approach the present and the future. Ultimately, this is a very conscious war for memory and heritage. It's a quest for legitimacy, the eternal quest for justification." In the early 20th century, Mildred Rutherford, the historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), led the attack against American history textbooks that did not present the "Lost Cause of the Confederacy" version of the history of the U.S. Civil War. To that pedagogical end, Rutherford assembled a "massive collection" of documents that included "essay contests on the glory of the Ku Klux Klan and personal tributes to faithful slaves". About the historical negationism of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the historian David Blight says: "All UDC members and leaders were not as virulently racist as Rutherford, but all, in the name of a reconciled nation, participated in an enterprise that deeply influenced the white supremacist vision of Civil War memory." California genocide Between 1846 and 1873, following the conquest of