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.
The Spanish Civil War created a conflict for Americans who preferred that the United States remain uninvolved in foreign affairs. Despite the country's isolationist tendencies, opposition to the rise ...of fascism across Europe convinced many Americans that they had to act in support of the Spanish Republic. While much has been written about the war itself and its international volunteers, little attention has been paid to those who coordinated these relief efforts at home. American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War tells the story of the political campaigns to raise aid for the Spanish Republic as activists pushed the limits of isolationist thinking. Those concerned with Spain's fate held a range of political convictions (including anarchists, socialists, liberals, and communists) with very different understandings of what fascism was. Yet they all agreed that fascism's advance must be halted. With labor strikes, fund- raising parties, and ambulance tours, defenders of Spain in the United States sought to shift the political discussion away from isolation of Spain's elected government and toward active assistance for the faltering Republic. Examining the American political organizations affiliated with this relief effort and the political repression that resulted as many of Spain's supporters faced the early incarnations of McCarthyism's trials, Smith provides new understanding of American politics during the crucial years leading up to World War II. By also focusing on the impact the Spanish Civil War had on those of Spanish ethnicity in the United States, Smith shows how close to home the seemingly distant war really hit.
Spain 1936 Rein, Raanan; Thomas, Joan Maria
04/2018
eBook
Marking the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, this volume takes a close look at the initial political moves, military actions and consequences of the fratricidal conflict and ...their impact on both Spaniards and contemporary European powers. The contributors re-examine the crystallization of the political alliances formed in the Republican and the Nationalist zones; the support mobilized by the two warring camps; and the different attitudes and policies adopted by neighbouring and far away countries. Spain 1936: Year Zero goes beyond and against commonly held assumptions as to the supposed unity of the Nationalist camp vis-a-vis the fragmentation of the Republican one; and likewise brings to the fore the complexities of initial support of the military rebellion by Nazi Germany and Soviet support of the beleaguered Republic. Situating the Iberian conflict in the larger international context, senior and junior scholars from various countries challenge the multitude of hitherto accepted ideas about the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War. A primary aim of the editors is to enable discussion on the Spanish Civil War from lesser known or realized perspectives by investigating the civil wars impact on countries such as Argentina, Japan, and Jewish Palestine; and from lesser heard voices at the time of women, intellectuals, and athletes. Original contributions are devoted to the Popular Olympiad organized in Barcelona in July 1936, Japanese perceptions of the Spanish conflict in light of the 1931 invasion to Manchuria, and international volunteers in the International Brigades.
What explains violence against civilians in civil wars? Why do groups kill civilians in areas where they have full military control and their rivals have no military presence? This innovative book ...connects pre-war politics to patterns of violence during civil war. It argues that both local political rivalry and local revenge account for violence against civilians. Armed groups perpetrate direct violence jointly with local civilians, who collaborate when violence can help them gain or consolidate local political control. As civil war continues, revenge motives also come into play, leading to spirals of violence at a local level. In an important contribution to the study of the Spanish Civil War, Balcells combines statistical analyses with ethnographic and qualitative research to provide new insights to scholars and academic researchers with an interest in civil war, politics and conflict processes. Rivalry and Revenge is theoretically and empirically rich, and it offers a theory and method generalizable to a wide set of cases.
Brigadistes Marti-Rueda, Jordi; Borras, Jordi; Newman, Mary Ann
03/2022
eBook
'A real treasure that we can’t stop exploring' – La RepublicaFelicia Browne decided it was time to put down her paintbrushes and pick up a rifle. Jimmy Yates left Chicago with three books in his ...bindle, sacrificing them all on the gruelling trek across the Pyrenees. Salaria Kea worked at the front as a nurse, judged by her skill rather than her skin colour...In 1936 something extraordinary happened. As the threat of fascism swept across the Iberian peninsula, thousands of people from all over the world left their families and jobs to heed the call - No Pasarán! History has never seen a wave of solidarity like it. The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 with the Republic crushed, but the revolutionary dream of the International Brigades has never burnt out.Through these 60 illustrated profiles, Brigadistes embroiders an epic story of political struggle with the everyday bravery, sorrow and love of those who lived it.
The struggle to define U.S. national identity through a political struggle in Spain
In 1938 the United States was embroiled in a vicious debate between supporters of the two sides of the Spanish ...Civil War, who sought either to lift or to retain the U.S. arms embargo on Spain. The embargo, which favored Gen. Francisco Franco’s Nationalist regime over the ousted Republican government of the Loyalists, received heavy criticism for enabling a supposedly fascist-backed takeover during a time when the Nazi party in Germany was threatening the annexation of countries across Europe. Supporters of General Franco, however, saw the resistance of the Loyalists as being spurred on by the Soviet Union, which sought to establish a communist government abroad.
Since World War II, American historians have traditionally sided with the Loyalist supporters, validating their arguments that the pro-Nationalists were un-American for backing an unpalatable dictator. In Arguing Americanism, author Michael E. Chapman examines the long-overlooked pro-Nationalist argument. Employing new archival sources, Chapman documents a small yet effective network of lobbyists—including engineer turned writer John Eoghan Kelly, publisher Ellery Sedgwick, homemaker Clare Dawes, muralist Hildreth Meière, and philanthropist Anne Morgan—who fought to promote General Franco’s Nationalist Spain and keep the embargo in place.
Arguing Americanism also goes beyond the embargo debate to examine the underlying issues that gripped 1930s America. Chapman posits that the Spanish embargo argument was never really about Spain but rather about the soul of Americanism, the definition of democracy, and who should do the defining. Pro-Loyalists wanted the pure democracy of the ballot box; pro-Nationalists favored the checks and balances of indirect democracy. By pointing to what was happening in Spain, each side tried to defend its version of Americanism against the foreign forces that threatened it. For Franco supporters, it was the spread of international Marxism, toward which they felt Roosevelt and his New Deal were too sympathetic. The pro-Nationalists intensified an argument that became a precursor to a fundamental change in American national identity—a change that would usher in the Cold War era.
Arguing Americanism will appeal to political scientists, cultural historians, and students of U.S. foreign relations.
The Nazis provided Franco’s Nationalists with planes, armaments, and tanks in their civil war against the Communists but behind this largesse was a Faustian bargain. Pierpaolo Barbieri makes a ...convincing case that the Nazis hoped to establish an economic empire in Europe, and in Spain they tested the tactics intended for future subject territories.
This book presents a new history of the most important conflict in European affairs during the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War. It describes the complex origins of the conflict, the collapse of the ...Spanish Republic and the outbreak of the only mass worker revolution in the history of Western Europe. Stanley Payne explains the character of the Spanish revolution and the complex web of republican politics, while also examining the development of Franco's counter-revolutionary dictatorship. Payne gives attention to the multiple meanings and interpretations of war and examines why the conflict provoked such strong reactions at the time, and long after. The book also explains the military history of the war and its place in the history of military development, the non-intervention policy of the democracies and the role of German, Italian and Soviet intervention, concluding with an analysis of the place of the war in European affairs, in the context of twentieth-century revolutionary civil wars.
International Communism and the Spanish Civil War provides an intimate picture of international communism in the Stalin era. Exploring the transnational exchanges that occurred in Soviet-structured ...spaces - from clandestine schools for training international revolutionaries in Moscow to the International Brigades in Spain - the book uncovers complex webs of interaction, at once personal and political, that linked international communists to one another and the Soviet Union. The Spanish Civil War, which coincided with the great purges in the Soviet Union, stands at the center of this grassroots history. For many international communists, the war came to define both their life histories and political commitments. In telling their individual stories, the book calls attention to a central paradox of Stalinism - the simultaneous celebration and suspicion of transnational interactions - and illuminates the appeal of a cause that promised solidarity even as it practiced terror.
