The Spanish Civil War has gone down in history for the horrific violence that it generated. The climate of euphoria and hope that greeted the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy was utterly transformed ...just five years later by a cruel and destructive civil war. Here Julián Casanova, one of Spain's leading historians, offers a magisterial new account of this critical period in Spanish history. He exposes the ways in which the Republic brought into the open simmering tensions between Catholics and hardline anticlericalists, bosses and workers, Church and State, order and revolution. In 1936 these conflicts tipped over into the sacas, paseos and mass killings which are still passionately debated today. The book also explores the decisive role of the international instability of the 1930s in the duration and outcome of the conflict. Franco's victory was in the end a victory for Hitler and Mussolini and for dictatorship over democracy.
At the time of its occurrence, the Spanish Civil War epitomized for the Western world the confrontation of democracy, fascism, and communism. An entire generation of Englishmen and Americans felt a ...deeper emotional involvement in that war than in any other world event of their lifetimes, including the Second World War. On the Continent, its "lessons," as interpreted by participants of many nationalities, have played an important role in the politics of both Western Europe and the People's Democracies. Everywhere in the Western world, readers of history have noted parallels between the Spanish Republic of 1931 and the revolutionary governments which existed in France and Central Europe during the year 1848. The Austrian revolt of October 1934, reminded participants and observers alike of the Paris Commune of 1871, and even the most politically unsophisticated observers could see in the Spain of 1936 all the ideological and class conflicts which had characterized revolutionary France of 1789 and revolutionary Russia of 1917.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the worthwhile books on the Spanish Civil War have almost all emphasized its international ramifications and have discussed its political crises entirely in the vocabulary of the French and Russian revolutions. Relatively few of the foreign participants realized that the Civil War had arisen out of specifically Spanish circumstances. Few of them knew the history of the Second Spanish Republic, which for five years prior to the war had been grappling with the problems of what we now call an "underdeveloped nation."
InSpanish Republic and the Civil War, Gabriel Jackson expounds the history of the Second Republic and the Civil War primarily as seen from within Spain.
This book delves into the conceptual changes produced by the Spanish constitutional debate held between 27 August and 9 December 1931. Taking place at the beginning of Spain’s Second Republic, those ...parliamentary deliberations brought about significant novelties in the political vocabulary. Concepts such as democracy, sovereignty, reform, revolution, and freedom, among others, were re-signified. This study investigates the conceptual contributions made by Spanish MPs in the course of the constitutional debate of 1931 by assuming, as a research approach, an interdisciplinary stance combining conceptual history, political theory, and parliamentary constitutional history. By doing so, it selects five determining issues: the pervasive discussion about two competing meanings of a democratic state; the rhetorical uses of reform and revolution; conceptual controversies about religious freedom; the disputed idea of property rights; and the functions of parliament and the president of the republic in a semi-presidential regime. The constitutional debate was largely inspired by interwar European constitutionalism which constituent representatives used to update the Spanish constitutional tradition. With that goal in mind, this book is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students and scholars working in the fields of conceptual history, political philosophy, parliamentary history, European political history, and European constitutionalism.
The Second Spanish Republic (1931-36) was the only new liberal democratic regime to emerge in Europe during the 1930s. Historians, however, have focused primarily on the Civil War of 1936-39 that ...followed, devoting much less attention to the parliamentary regime that preceded it. This book deals with the history and failure of the democratic polity in Spain through a detailed examination of the initiatives of its president, Niceto Alcala Zamora. As civil servant, lawyer, politician and writer, by 1931 he had become one of the most successful men of Spain. He played the leading role in the downfall of the monarchy and the inauguration of the Republic, which he served for eight months as initial prime minister and then as the first president. Stanley Payne's study argues that the failure of the Republic was not inevitable but depended on the policy choices of its president and the key party leaders. Alcala Zamora's professed goal was to center the Republic, stabilizing the new regime while avoiding extremes, but he failed altogether in this project. The Constitution of 1931 stipulated the double responsibility of parliamentary government both to the president and to a voting majority. Though Alcala Zamora resisted strong efforts from the left to cancel the results of the first fully democratic elections in 1933, he subsequently used his powers recklessly, making and unmaking governments at will, refusing to permit normal functioning of parliament. This first critical scholarly account of the presidency of Alcala Zamora casts new light on the failure of democracy in interwar Europe and on the origins of the Spanish Civil War.
This book provides a unique, thorough, and indispensable resource for anyone investigating the causes and consequences of the Dust Bowl. During the 1930s, drought and the cultivation of submarginal ...lands created a severe wind-erosion problem in the southern Great Plains, a region that became known as the Dust Bowl. During the worst dust storms, the blowing soil often turned day into night. Some people died when caught outside during a black blizzard, others developed "dust pneumonia," and some residents moved to California. Most people, however, remained. Those who stayed and endured the storms had an abiding faith that federal resources and the return of normal rainfall would end the dust storms and return life to normal, free from the desperation and fear caused by the blowing soil. Documents of the Dust Bowl offers a fascinating documentary history of one of the worst ecological disasters in American history. It will enable high school students and academics alike to study the manner in which Dust Bowl residents confronted and endured the dust storms in the southern Great Plains during the 1930s.
Following WWII, the authoritarian and morally austere dictatorship of General Francisco Franco's Spain became the playground for millions of carefree tourists from Europe's prosperous democracies. ...This book chronicles how this helped to strengthen Franco's regime and economic and political standing.
Unearthing Franco's Legacy addresses the debate in Spain resulting from the discovery and exhumation of mass graves created by General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War.
A profound reinterpretation of both the Dust Bowl on the U.S. southern plains and its relevance for todayThe 1930s witnessed a harrowing social and ecological disaster, defined by the severe nexus of ...drought, erosion, and economic depression that ravaged the U.S. southern plains. Known as the Dust Bowl, this crisis has become a major referent of the climate change era, and has long served as a warning of the dire consequences of unchecked environmental despoliation.Through innovative research and a fresh theoretical lens, Hannah Holleman reexamines the global socioecological and economic forces of settler colonialism and imperialism precipitating this disaster, explaining critical antecedents to the acceleration of ecological degradation in our time. Holleman draws lessons from this period that point a way forward for environmental politics as we confront the growing global crises of climate change, freshwater scarcity, extreme energy, and soil degradation.
In the 1930s, anarchists and socialists among Spanish immigrants living in the United States created España Libre ( Free Spain ) as a response to the Nationalist takeover in their homeland. ...Worker-oriented and avowedly antifascist, the grassroots periodical raised money for refugees and political prisoners while advancing left-wing culture and politics. España Libre proved both visionary and durable, charting an alternate path toward a modern Spain and enduring until democracy's return to the country in 1977. Montse Feu merges España Libre 's story with the drama of the Spanish immigrant community's fight against fascism. The periodical emerged as part of a transnational effort to link migrants and new exiles living in the United States to antifascist networks abroad. In addition to showing how workers' culture and politics shaped their antifascism, Feu brings to light creative works that ranged from literature to satire to cartoons to theater. As España Libre opened up radical practices, it encouraged allies to reject violence in favor of social revolution's potential for joy and inclusion.
In this compelling book Stanley G. Payne offers the first comprehensive narrative of Soviet and Communist intervention in the revolution and civil war in Spain. He documents in unprecedented detail ...Soviet strategies, Comintern activities, and the role of the Communist party in Spain from the early 1930s to the end of the civil war in 1939.
Drawing on a very broad range of Soviet and Spanish primary sources, including many only recently available, Payne changes our understanding of Soviet and Communist intentions in Spain, of Stalin's decision to intervene in the Spanish war, of the widely accepted characterization of the conflict as the struggle of fascism against democracy, and of the claim that Spain's war constituted the opening round of World War II. The author arrives at a new view of the Spanish Civil War and concludes not only that the Democratic Republic had many undemocratic components but also that the position of the Communist party was by no means counterrevolutionary.
