Madrid became one of the key symbols of Republican resistance to General Franco during the Spanish Civil War following the Nationalists' failure to take the city in the winter of 1936-7. Yet despite the defiant cries of 'No pasaran', they did eventually pass on 28 March 1939. This book examines the consequences in Madrid of Franco's unconditional victory in the Spanish Civil War. Using recently available archival material, this study shows how the punishment of the vanquished was based on a cruel irony - Republicans, not the military rebels of July 1936, were held responsible for the fratricidal conflict. Military tribunals handed out sentences for the crime of 'military rebellion'; mere passivity towards the Nationalists before 1939 was not only made a civil offence under the Law of Political Responsibilities but could cause dismissal from work; and freemasons and Communists, specifically blamed for the Civil War, were criminalized by decree in March 1940.
However, contrary to much that has been written on the subject, the post-war Francoist repression was not exterminatory. Genocide did not take place in post-war Madrid. While a minimum of 3113 judicial executions took place between 1939 and 1944, death sentences were largely based on accusations of participation in 'blood crimes' that occurred in Madrid in 1936. Moreover, and unlike most other accounts of the Francoist political violence, this book is concerned with the question of when and why mass repression came to an end. It shows that the sheer numbers of cases opened against Republican 'rebels', and the use of complex pre-war bureaucratic procedures to process them, produced a crisis that was only resolved by decisionstaken by the Franco regime in 1940-1 to abandon much of the repressive system. By 1944, mass repression had come to an end.

This volume examines the Russo-Japanese War in its military, diplomatic, social, political, economic, and cultural context. Through the use of research from newly opened Russian and little used Japanese sources the editors assert that the Russo-Japanese War was, in fact, World War Zero, the first global conflict in the 20th century. The contributors demonstrate that the Russo-Japanese War, largely forgotten in the aftermath of World War One, actually was a precursor to the catastrophe that engulfed the world less than a decade after the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth. This study not only further reveals the weaknesses of Imperial Russia but also exhibits Japan as it entered its fateful 20th century. Contributors: Oleg Rudolfovich Airapetov; Boris Vasilevich Ananich; Michael Auslin; Paul A. Bushkovitch; John Bushnell; Frederick R. Dickinson; Tatiana Aleksandrovna Filippova; David Goldfrank; Antti Kujala; Dominic Lieven; Igor Vladimirovich Lukoianov; Pertti Luntinen; Steven Marks; Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka; David Maclaren Mcdonald; Bruce W. Menning; Edward S. Miller; Ian Nish; Dmitrii Ivanovich Oleinikov; Nicholas Papastratigakis; Paul A. Rodell; Norman E. Saul; Charles Schencking; Barry Scherr; David Schimmelpenninck Van Der Oye; Evgenii Iurevich Sergeev; Naoko Shimazu; Yokote Shinji; John W. Steinberg; Richard Stites; James T. Ulak; David Wolff; Don Wright.

Letters to Eleanor: Voices of the Great Depression examines how the flood of letters from ordinary Americans to the First Lady established a bond of hope and trust. Through this paper trail, Eleanor Roosevelt was able to help many petitioners find jobs, food, housing, and clothes. To others she offered the encouragement and support many need in the bleak Thirties. Through it all Eleanor Roosevelt exhibited a tradionalist social outlook by her support of homemakers and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. But as the New Deal matured, she became an ardent reformer who fought for an anti-lynching law and job opportunity for women in the federal service. Buy beneath her incessant activity to help others there was an inner Eleanor who constantly sought emotional support from female colleagues or her distant correspondents, a support she did not receive form FDR or her family.

It is a commonplace of Schmitt scholarship that the controversial thinker sought to recapture some of the elan of the pre-Weimar state through his advocacy of effectively almost unlimited presidential government. Seitzer demonstrates how Schmitt believed comparative history itself could reinvigorate the ailing German state by subtly altering prevailing understandings of the relation of theory and practice in law and politics. Treating Schmitt's Constitutional Theory and Guardian of the Constitution as methodologically sophisticated comparative histories, Seitzer turns Schmitt's argument against itself. He shows how Schmitt's comparative histories, when properly executed, support a decentralized solution to the Republic's difficulties directly contrary to Schmitt's in terms of its purpose and effect. Problem-oriented, comparative-historical studies of key features of the Weimar system suggest that the dispersion of political power facilitates an institutional dialogue over constitutional principle and practice that better provides for political stability and democratic experimentation. These studies also suggest that linking forms of justification with institutions establishes a productive tension among norms and institutions that is essential to maintaining the viability of constitutional democracy, both in the short- and long-term. This work will be of considerable value to Schmitt scholars and those interested in German legal and political theory as well as those concerned with broad issues in comparative law and European history and political theory.

At Home in Our Sounds illustrates the effect jazz music had on the enormous social challenges Europe faced in the aftermath of World War I. Examining the ways African American, French Antillean, and French West African artists reacted to the heightened visibility of racial difference in Paris during this era, author Rachel Anne Gillett addresses fundamental cultural questions that continue to resonate today: Could one be both black and French? Was black solidarity more important than national and colonial identity? How could French culture include the experiences and contributions of Africans and Antilleans? Providing a well-rounded view of black reactions to jazz in interwar Paris, At Home in Our Sounds deals with artists from highly educated women like the Nardal sisters of Martinique, to the working black musicians performing at all hours throughout the city. In so doing, the book places this phenomenon in its historical and political context and shows how music and music-making constituted a vital terrain of cultural politics-one that brought people together around pianos and on the dancefloor, but that did not erase the political, regional, and national differences between them.

British women who resisted their own enfranchisement were ridiculed by the suffragists and have since been neglected by historians. Yet these women, together with the millions whose indifference reinforced the opposition case, claimed to form a majority of the female public on the eve of the First World War. By 1914 the organized "antis" rivaled the suffragists in numbers, though not in terms of publicity-seeking activism. The National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage was dominated by the self-consciously masculine leadership of Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon, but also heavily dependent upon an impressive cadre of women leaders and a mostly female membership.
Women Against the Vote looks at three overlapping groups of women: maternal reformers, women writers and imperialist ladies. These women are then followed into action as campaigners in their own right, as well as supporters of anti-suffrage men. Collaboration between the sexes was not always straightforward, even within a movement dedicated to separate and complementary gender roles. As the anti-suffrage women pursued their own varied social and political agendas, they demonstrated their affinity with the mainstream social conservatism of the British women's movement. The rediscovered history of female anti-suffragism provides new perspectives on the campaigns both for and against the vote. It also makes an important contribution to the wider history of women's social and political activism in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Britain.

This work offers a new discussion of racism in America that focuses on how White people have been affected by their own racism and how it impacts upon relations between Blacks and Whites. This study draws attention to how racism is distinctly different from race, and it shows how, since the late 17th century, most Whites have been afflicted by their own racism, as evidenced by considerable delusional thinking, dehumanization, alienation from America, and psychological and social pathology. White people have created and maintained a White racist America, which is the antithesis of liberty, equality, justice, and freedom; Black people continue to be the primary victims of this culture. Although racism in America has changed since the 1950s and 1960s from a blatant and violent White racist America to a less violent and more subtle White racist America, racism still severely hampers the ability of most Blacks to develop and be free. The continuing racist context in which Blacks live requires that they organize and use effective group power, or Black Power, to help themselves. One obstacle to Black achievement is the use of intelligence tests, which are wholly unscientific and represent a manifestation of subtle White racism. A challenge to the writing on race in this country, this work focuses on the victims and not the perpetrators.

The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. This series of International Ford Madox Ford Studies was founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in him. Each volume is based upon a particular theme or issue; and relates aspects of Ford's work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. Ford is best-known for his fiction, especially "The Good Soldier," long considered a modernist masterpiece; and "Parade's End," which Anthony Burgess described as 'the finest novel about the First World War', Samuel Hynes has called 'the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman', and which has been adapted by Tom Stoppard for the BBC and HBO. Ford's America, like the other places he wrote about extensively such as England or France, is a place of the imagination as much as the real place in which he lived and travelled. This volume is the first extended treatment of Ford's lifelong contacts with American literature and culture. It combines contributions from British and American experts on Ford and Modernism. It has five closely inter-connected sections which display, between them, the range of Ford's creative relationships with American writers and American territory. The first explores the transatlantic dimension of Ford's modernism, from his involvement with Americans like James and Pound in Britain before the war, through the Paris days among the Americans in the "transatlantic review "circle such as Hemingway and Stein, to his time in America in the 20s and 30s, and the American care for his reputation after his death. The second section focuses on New York, and the publishing world portrayed in Ford's only novel set mainly in the US, "When the Wicked Man." A third section, discussing culture, politics, and journalism in his writing of the 1930s, is followed by two examples of his commentary on contemporary American culture, both published here for the first time. The final section juxtaposes two examples of the many American writers who have paid tribute to Ford: an essay tracking Robert Lowell's regular recollections of his encounters with him; and Mary Gordon's celebration of his life with the Polish-American painter Janice Biala. The volume also contains fourteen illustrations, including artwork by Biala and photographs of Ford.

Gennady Estraikh's book explores the birth, growth, demise and afterlife of the Birobidzhan Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR). The History of Birobidzhan looks at how the shtetl was widely used in Soviet propaganda as a perfect solution to the 'Jewish question', arguing that in reality, while being demographically and culturally insignificant, the JAR played a key, and essentially detrimental, role in determining Jewish rights and entitlements in the Soviet world. Estraikh brings together a broad range of Russian and Yiddish sources, including archival materials, newspaper articles, travelogues, memoirs, belles-letters, and scholarly publications, as he describes and analyses the project and its realization not in isolation, but rather in the context of developments in both domestic and international life. As well as offering an assessment of the Birobidzhan project in the contexts of Soviet and Jewish history, the book also focuses on the contemporary 'Jewish' role of the region which now has only a few thousand Jewish occupants amongst its residents.

This book explores the use of antisemitism by Britain's interwar fascists and the ways in which the country's Jews reacted to this, examining the two alongside one another for the first time and locating both within the broader context of contemporary events in Europe. Daniel Tilles challenges existing conceptions of the antisemitism of Britain's foremost fascist organisation, the British Union of Fascists. He demonstrates that it was a far more central aspect of the party's thought than has previously been assumed. This, in turn, will be shown to be characteristic of the wider relationship between interwar European fascism and antisemitism, a thus far relatively neglected issue in the burgeoning field of fascist studies. Tilles also argues that the BUF's leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, far from being a reluctant convert to the anti-Jewish cause, or simply a cynical exploiter of it, as much of the existing scholarship suggests, was aware of the role antisemitism would play in his fascist doctrine from the start and remained in control of its subsequent development. These findings are used to support the notion that, contrary to prevailing perceptions, Jewish opposition to the BUF played no part in provoking the fascists' adoption of antisemitism. Britain's Jews did, nevertheless, play a significant role in shaping British fascism's path of development, and the wide-ranging and effective anti-fascist activity they pursued represents an important alternative narrative to the dominant image of Jews as mere victims of fascism.

The "sequel" to his best-selling Classes and Cultures, Ross McKibbin's latest book is a powerful reinterpretation of British politics in the first decades of universal suffrage. What did it mean to be a "democratic society?" To what extent did voters make up their own minds on politics or allow elites to do it for them?
Exploring the political culture of these extraordinary years, Parties and People shows that class became one of the principal determinants of political behaviour, although its influence was often surprisingly weak.
McKibbin argues that the kind of democracy that emerged in Britain was far from inevitable-as much historical accident as design-and was in many ways highly flawed.

Until recently, scholars assumed that women "stopped speaking" after they won the vote in 1920 and did not reenter political life until the second wave of feminism began in the 1960s. Nothing could be further from the truth. While national attention did dissipate after 1920, women did not retreat from political and civic life. Rather, after winning the vote, women's public activism shifted from a single-issue agenda to the myriad social problems and public issues that faced the nation. As such, women began to take their place in the public square as political actors in their own rights rather than strictly campaigning for a "women's issue." This anthology documents women's activism during this period by introducing heretofore unpublished public speeches that address a wide array of debated topics including child labor, international relations, nuclear disarmament, consumerism, feminism and anti-feminism, social welfare, family life, war, and the environment. Some speeches were delivered in legislative forums, others at schools, churches, business meetings, and media events; still others before national political organizations. To ensure diversity, the volume features speakers of different ages, races, classes, ethnicities, geographic regions, and political persuasions. The volume editors include short biographical introductions as well as historical context for each selection.

"During the first three months of 1972 a trial took place in the middle district of Pennsylvania: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA versus Eqbal Ahmad, Philip Berrigan, Elizabeth McAlister, Neil McLaughlin, Anthony Scoblick, Mary Cain Scoblick, Joseph Wenderoth. The defendants stood accused of conspiring to raid federal offices, to bomb government property, and to kidnap presidential advisor Henry Kissinger. Six of those seven individuals are, or were, Roman Catholic clergy-priests and nuns. Members of the new 'Catholic Left.'" -from the introduction When The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left was originally published in 1972, it remained on The New York Times Book Review "New and Recommended" list for six weeks and was selected as one of the Notable Books of the Year. Now, forty years later, William O'Rourke's book eloquently speaks to a new generation of readers interested in American history and the religious anti-war protest movements of the Vietnam era. O'Rourke brings to life the seven anti-war activists, who were vigorously prosecuted for alleged criminal plots, filling in the drama of the case, the trial, the events, the demonstrations, the panels, and the people. O'Rourke includes a new afterword that presents a sketch of the evolution of protest groups from the 1960s and 1970s, including the history of the New Catholic Left for the past four decades, claiming that "[a]fter the Harrisburg trial, the New Catholic Left became the New Catholic Right."

For Russia, it was a time of troubles: war, famine, and social upheaval the likes of which the world had never seen before. World War I, two revolutions in 1917, and the subsequent civil war and Allied intervention completely eradicated one regime and replaced it with a radically new one. Now an award-winning diplomatic historian ties these events together to reveal their far-reaching consequences for the future of not only the new Soviet Union but of the United States as well.

In War and Revolution, Norman Saul offers a fresh analysis of this troubled era in Russia and of the American reaction to it. Tracing the events surrounding America's entry into the European conflict and its encouragement of continued Russian participation even in the face of domestic unrest, he shows how those circumstances adversely affected relations between two nations and shaped their futures in the century ahead.

Drawing on rarely accessed military and diplomatic archives in both countries, Saul reaches beyond official actions to give readers a vivid sense of those times. He surveys the vast panorama of events while providing not only detailed accounts of the activities of consular, diplomatic, and military staffs but also colorful vignettes of ordinary Americans in Russia involved in humanitarian relief and other activities. Businessmen and artists, Red Cross volunteers and journalists -- all were caught up in the immediacy of war and revolution, and all contributed to the shifting sentiments of two nations.

War and Revolution is the third volume in Saul's sweeping history of U.S.-Russian relations, already hailed for setting "a new standard for how the history of international relations ought to bewritten" (TLS). Here he further develops the theme of "mirror-imaging", describing ways in which Americans and Russians saw themselves as having a common relationship distinguished from other European or Asian nations. Despite the turmoil of this era, he explains, Russians continued to look to America for ideas and models while Americans expected Russians to follow their lead in developing resources and reforming institutions.

By 1921, Americans were in a quandary about Russia as its former friend pursued a hostile course beyond U.S. control. Saul's account of those years clearly shows how this parting of the ways came about -- and how it set the stage for a cold war that would test both country's wills later in the century.

"Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War" discusses the participation of volunteers of Jewish descent in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. It focuses in particular on the establishment of the Naftali Botwin Company, a Jewish military unit that was created in the Polish Dombrowski Brigade. Its formation and short-lived history on the battlefield were closely connected to the activities and propaganda of Yiddish-speaking Jewish migrant communists in Paris who described Jewish volunteers as 'Chosen Fighters of the Jewish People' in their daily newspaper "Naye Prese."Gerben Zaagsma analyses the symbolic meaning of the participation of Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company both during and after the civil war. He puts this participation in the broader context of Jewish involvement in the left and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in the communist movement and beyond. To this end, the book examines representations of Jewish volunteers in the Parisian Yiddish press (both communist and non-communist). In addition it analyses the various ways in which Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company have been commemorated after WWII, tracing how discourses about Jewish volunteers became decisively shaped by post-Holocaust debates on Jewish responses to fascism and Nazism, and discusses claims that Jewish volunteers can be seen as 'the first Jews to resist Hitler with arms'.

The New York Times-bestselling history of the first half of the twentieth century-five decades that transformed America-from the author of Only Yesterday. During the first fifty years of the twentieth century, the United States saw two world wars, a devastating economic depression, and more social, political, and economic changes than in any other five-decade period before. Frederick Lewis Allen, former editor of Harper's magazine, recounts these years-spanning World War I, the Progressive Era, the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War-in vivid detail, from the fashions and customs of the times to major events that changed the course of history. Politically, the United States grew into its own as a global superpower during these years, even as domestic developments altered the everyday lives of its citizens. The introduction of the automobile, mass production, and organized labor changed the way Americans lived and worked, while innovations like penicillin and government regulation of food safety contributed to an increase in average life expectancy from forty-nine years in 1900 to sixty-eight years in 1950. With the development of a strong, centralized government, a thriving middle class, and widespread economic prosperity, the nation emerged from the Second World War transformed in virtually every way. Richly informative and delightfully readable, The Big Change is an indispensable volume charting the many changes that ushered in our contemporary age.