How do peasants come to think of themselves as members of a nation? The widely accepted argument is that national sentiment originates among intellectuals or urban middle classes, then "trickles down" to the working class and peasants. Keely Stauter-Halsted argues that such models overlook the independent contribution of peasant societies. She explores the complex case of the Polish peasants of Austrian Galicia, from the 1848 emancipation of the serfs to the eve of the First World War.

In the years immediately after emancipation, Polish-speaking peasants were more apt to identify with the Austrian Emperor and the Catholic Church than with their Polish lords or the middle classes of the Galician capital, Cracow. Yet by the end of the century, Polish-speaking peasants would cheer, "Long live Poland" and celebrate the centennial of the peasant-fueled insurrection in defense of Polish independence.

The explanation for this shift, Stauter-Halsted says, is the symbiosis that developed between peasant elites and upper-class reformers. She reconstructs this difficult, halting process, paying particular attention to public life and conflicts within the rural communities themselves. The author's approach is at once comparative and interdisciplinary, drawing from literature on national identity formation in Latin America, China, and Western Europe. The Nation in the Village combines anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism with economic, social, cultural, and political history.

During the Russian Revolution and Civil War, amateur theater groups sprang up in cities across the country. Workers, peasants, students, soldiers, and sailors provided entertainment ranging from improvisations to gymnastics and from propaganda sketches to the plays of Chekhov. In Revolutionary Acts, Lynn Mally reconstructs the history of the amateur stage in Soviet Russia from 1917 to the height of the Stalinist purges. Her book illustrates in fascinating detail how Soviet culture was transformed during the new regime's first two decades in power.

Of all the arts, theater had a special appeal for mass audiences in Russia, and with the coming of the revolution it took on an important role in the dissemination of the new socialist culture. Mally's analysis of amateur theater as a space where performers, their audiences, and the political authorities came into contact enables her to explore whether this culture emerged spontaneously "from below" or was imposed by the revolutionary elite. She shows that by the late 1920s, Soviet leaders had come to distrust the initiatives of the lower classes, and the amateur theaters fell increasingly under the guidance of artistic professionals. Within a few years, state agencies intervened to homogenize repertoire and performance style, and with the institutionalization of Socialist Realist principles, only those works in a unified Soviet canon were presented.

Russians have often been characterized as people with souls rather than selves. Self and Story in Russian History challenges the portrayal of the Russian character as selfless, self-effacing, or self-torturing by exploring the texts through which Russians have defined themselves as private persons and shaped their relation to the cultural community. The stories of self under consideration here reflect the perspectives of men and women from the last two hundred years, ranging from westernized nobles to simple peasants, from such famous people as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Akhmatova, and Nicholas II to lowly religious sectarians.

Fifteen distinguished historians and literary scholars situate the narratives of self in their historical context and show how, since the eighteenth century, Russians have used expressive genres -- including diaries, novels, medical case studies, films, letters, and theater -- to make political and moral statements.

The first book to examine the narration of self as idea and ideal in Russia, this vital work contemplates the shifting historical manifestations of identity, the strategies of self-creation, and the diversity of narrative forms. Its authors establish that there is a history of the individual in Russian culture roughly analogous to the one associated with the West.

Women faced conflicting demands under Franco's programme of National Catholicism. State-sponsored economic development created a modern consumer society, yet women were expected to remain passive and private, conforming to 16th-century ideals of Catholic womanhood. Using diverse sources - including oral interviews, magazine advertisements and university archives, Morcillo explores the contradictions between modernization and traditional gender expectations. Using a textured history of major women's organizations from the 1940s through the 1960s it demonstrates that Spanish women successfully negotiated these contradictions, creating a vibrant and meaningful public space for women's social activism. Their very spirituality protected these women from state retribution in their search for "true Catholic womanhood". "True Catholic Womanhood" adds new insights into the gender dynamics of authoritarian states. It should be useful reading for all those interested in modern Spain, Catholicism, European women's history and authoritarian social politics.

During World War II, movements organized to resist Nazi occupation grew throughout Europe. In Greece the resistance movement also involved an unprecedented opportunity for social and political change initiated by the largest organization, the National Liberation Front or EAM. Key leaders envisioned postwar Greece as a popular democracy structured to allow a range of new voices to be heard. Believing gender equality to be one of the hallmarks of modernity, they attempted to expand the category of "national citizen" to include women as well as men. Janet Hart describes, often in the words of the Greek women involved, how lives were transformed by active participation in the resistance against the Nazis and in the anticommunist aftermath of the war. Political action proved exhilarating for women who had grown up in a prewar world of narrowly constricted gender roles. Hart has interviewed many survivors, and their testimony transcends local boundaries to capture the experience of emancipation. New Voices in the Nation explores the historical memory of social transformation, finding in personal narrative a key to new conceptions of societal change. The author places the resistance movement in an international context by examining how the struggle to promote modern political culture among ordinary people took shape on the ground in the course of the battle against conquering Axis forces. Hart uses insights gleaned from former partisans, Italian leader and political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, histories of black consciousness, and her own perceptions as an African American to explore topics of compelling current concern: the relation between gender and political action, the role ofnationalism in the raising of gender-based consciousness, and the ways in which social movements, by challenging the political status quo, may ultimately find themselves targeted as threats to state equilibrium.

The New Germany provides a picture of contemporary Germany from a variety of perspectives, establishing relationships between recent political events and society and cultural life. Contributors include distinguished specialists in German Studies, including John Sandford, Michael Patterson, Karl Koch and Charles Jeffery. Part 1 sets the scene, discussing the demise of East Germany from historical perspective and unification in terms of the social problems that have been provoked. Part 2 covers the new political structure and Germany's role as a European power as well as the social, educational and economic problems generated, especially in the east, by the western takeover of the former GDR. Part 3 is an extensive section devoted to culture and the arts, with studies of the media, literature, theatre, film and language.

Portrays the cultural bohemia of turn-of-the-century Paris who carried the arts into a period of renewal and accomplishment, who laid the ground-work for Dadaism and Surrealism.

Spain has for too long been considered peripheral to the human catastrophes of World War II and the Holocaust. This volume is the first broadly interdisciplinary, scholarly collection to situate Spain in a position of influence in the history and culture of the Second World War. Featuring essays by international experts in the fields of history, literary studies, cultural studies, political science, sociology, and film studies, this book clarifies historical issues within Spain while also demonstrating the impact of Spain's involvement in the Second World War on historical memory of the Holocaust. Many of the contributors have done extensive archival research, bringing new information and perspectives to the table, and in many cases the essays published here analyze primary and secondary material previously unavailable in English. Spain, the Second World War, and the Holocaust reaches beyond discipline, genre, nation, and time period to offer previously unknown evidence of Spain's continued relevance to the Holocaust and the Second World War.

Despite the repression, violence, and social hardship which characterised Spanish life in the 1940s and 1950s, the Franco regime sought to win popular support by promoting its apparent commitment to social justice. David Brydan reveals the vital role which the idea of the Francoist 'social state' also played in the regime's ongoing search for international legitimacy. Using research from eighteen archives across six countries, Brydan shows how social experts, particularly those working in the fields of public health, medicine, and social insurance, were at the forefront of efforts to promote the regime abroad. By working with international organisations in Geneva, Paris, and New York and with transnational networks of colleagues across Europe, Africa, and Latin America, they sought to sell the idea of Franco's Spain as a respectable, modern, and socially-just state. They were internationalists, but they were Franco's internationalists. In telling this story, the study disrupts our understanding of the modern history of internationalism. Exploring what it meant for Francoist experts to think and act internationally, it challenges dominant accounts of internationalism as a liberal, progressive movement by foregrounding the history of fascist, nationalist, imperialist, and religious forms of international cooperation. It also brings into focus the overlooked continuities between international structures and projects before and after 1945. The case of Spain reveals the contested and heterogeneous nature of mid-twentieth century internationalism, characterised by the competition between overlapping global, regional, and imperial projects.

In Volume I, E. H. Carr begins with an analysis of the events in Russian history from 1898 to 1917 that shaped the course of the Revolution. He examines the constitutional structure erected by the new government and then turns to the multifarious problems facing the Bolsheviks as they took possession of a rapidly disintegrating Russian empire.

In virtually all sectors of the economy, evidence of stagnation, waste, and mismanagement proliferates. The convergence of these problems is no historical accident. As Marshall Goldman. a leading analyst of the Soviet economy, demonstrates, the Russians continue to adhere to a planning model set forth by Stalin in the 1920s. The chances of a turnaround, therefore, hinge on reform of the system reform that the Soviet leaders fear might trigger unpredictable and uncontrollable forces that have been pent up for sixty-five years."

The book is dedicated to the extraordinary cardboard by Pablo Picasso depicting his masterpiece - Guernica - the tapestry of which was displayed at the entrance to the UN Security Council room. The cartoon, created eighteen years after the oil painting, arises from an exceptional collaboration - as well as friendship - between Pablo Picasso, Nelson Rockefeller, one of the greatest patrons of the twentieth century, and the artist Jacqueline de la Baume Durrbach, who recreated the painting of Guernica through the ancient art of the tapestry. The book tells the story of cardboard, while offering a critical reading of the painting, which has become a universal symbol of values linked to democracy, freedom and peace. Text in English and Italian.

This book is an archaeological exploration of a conflict landscape encountered by the volunteers of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. A great deal is known about the Brigades in terms of inter-world war geopolitics, their history and make-up, but less is known about the materiality of the landscapes in which they lived, fought, and died. The Spanish Civil War was a relatively static conflict. As in the First World War, it consisted of entrenched Republican government lines facing similarly entrenched Nationalist (rebel) lines, and these ran north to south across Spain. Fighting was intermittent, so the front line soldiers had to settle in, and make what was an attritional war-scape, a place to live in and survive. This research examines one such war-scape as a place of 'settlement', where soldiers lived their daily lives as well as confronting the rigours of war - and these were the volunteers of the International Brigades, both foreign and Spanish, who occupied a section of lines southeast of Zaragoza in Aragon in 1937 and 1938. This research draws, not only on the techniques of landscape archaeology, but also on the writings of international volunteers in Spain - in particular, George Orwell - and it incorporates historical photography as a uniquely analytical, archaeological resource.

With its selection as the court of the Spanish Habsburgs, Madrid became the de facto capital of a global empire, a place from which momentous decisions were made whose implications were felt in all corners of a vast domain. By the seventeenth century, however, political theory produced in the Monarquia Hispanica dealt primarily with the concept of decline. In this book, Jesus Escobar argues that the buildings of Madrid tell a different story about the final years of the Habsburg dynasty. Madrid took on a grander public face over the course of the seventeenth century, creating a "court space" for residents and visitors alike. Drawing from the representation of the city's architecture in prints, books, and paintings, as well as re-created plans standing in for lost documents, Escobar demonstrates how, through shared forms and building materials, the architecture of Madrid embodied the monarchy and promoted its chief political ideals of justice and good government. Habsburg Madrid explores palaces, public plazas, a town hall, a courthouse, and a prison, narrating the lived experience of architecture in a city where a wide roster of protagonists, from architects and builders to royal patrons, court bureaucrats, and private citizens, helped shape a modern capital. Richly illustrated, highly original, and written by a leading scholar in the field, this volume disrupts the traditional narrative about seventeenth-century Spanish decadencia. It will be welcomed by specialists in Habsburg Spain and by historians of art, architecture, culture, economics, and politics.

In Transcending Textuality, Ariadna Garcia-Bryce provides a fresh look at post-Trent political culture and Francisco de Quevedo's place within it by examining his works in relation to two potentially rival means of transmitting authority: spectacle and print. Quevedo's highly theatrical conceptions of power are identified with court ceremony, devotional ritual, monarchical and spiritual imagery, and religious and classical oratory. At the same time, his investment in physical and emotional display is shown to be fraught with concern about the decline of body-centered modes of propagating authority in the increasingly impersonalized world of print. Transcending Textuality shows that Quevedo's poetics are, in great measure, defined by the attempt to retain in writing the qualities of live physical display.

Valencia has traditionally been seen as somewhat exceptional within Spain: a prosperous, agricultural export-oriented economy dominated by small- and medium-sized farmers. This tranquil image of Levante feliz contrasts sharply with those of rebellious, proletarian Barcelona, or impoverished, feudal Andalusia, with which the CNT and the Spanish anarchist movement is most closely associated. However, this new study shows that Valencia in the 1920s and 1930s was anything but tranquil. The vertiginous growth of the CNT between 1918 and 1920 led to the province being a major target of government repression. The situation there was considered by one Interior Minister as more worrying than in Barcelona. Later, in the 1930s, urban Valencia became the focus of a fierce struggle between hard-line revolutionaries linked to the anarchist FAI and more moderate trade unions, whilst numerous local insurrections broke out in rural areas of the province. Eventually, these two factions would form an uneasy truce in time to lead the Valencian left in the battle to overcome the military coup of July 1936 and secure this vital economic region for the Republican side. In providing the first English-language study of this important movement, Dr Purkiss fills a significant gap in the historiography of the Spanish left. Drawing on a wide range of previously underused primary sources, he shows that not only was Valencia a hugely important source of anarchist support, but that the local movement was far more radical than has previously been thought. He thus provides a vital insight into the origins of the revolutionary and anti-clerical violence which swept the province in the early months of Civil War, introducing us to the 'expropriators' and 'men of action' whose activities terrified bourgeois Valencia in the 1930s. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

Bilingual Legacies examines fatherhood in the work of four canonical Spanish authors born in Barcelona and raised during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Drawing on the autobiographical texts of Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Barral, Terenci Moix, and Clara Janes, the book explores how these authors understood gender roles and paternal figures as well as how they positioned themselves in relation to Spanish and Catalan literary traditions. Anna Casas Aguilar contends that through their presentation of father figures, these authors subvert static ideas surrounding fatherhood. She argues that this diversity was crucial in opening the door to revised gender models in Spain during the democratic period. Moving beyond the shadow of the dictator, Casas Aguilar shows how these writers distinguished between the patriarchal "father of the nation" and their own paternal figures. In doing so, Bilingual Legacies sheds light on the complexity of Spanish conceptions of gender, language, and family and illustrates how notions of masculinity, authorship, and canon are interrelated.

The word "bibliophilia" indicates a love of books, both as texts to be read and objects to be cherished for their physical qualities. Throughout the history of Iberian print culture, bibliophiles have attempted to explain the psychological experiences of reading and collecting books, as well as the social and economic conditions of book production. Bibliophiles, Murderous Bookmen, and Mad Librarians analyses Spanish bibliophiles who catalogue, organize, and archive books, as well as the publishers, artists, and writers who create them. Robert Richmond Ellis examines how books are represented in modern Spanish writing and how Spanish bibliophiles reflect on the role of books in their lives and in the histories and cultures of modern Spain. Through the combined approaches of literary studies, book history, and the book arts, Ellis argues that two strains of Spanish bibliophilia coalesce in the modern period: one that envisions books as a means of achieving personal fulfilment, and another that engages with politics and uses books to affirm linguistic, cultural, and regional and national identities.

This book revises what we thought we knew about one of the most famous witch hunts in European history. Between 1608 and 1614, thousands of witchcraft accusations were leveled against men, women, and children in the northern Spanish kingdom of Navarre. The Inquisition intervened quickly but incompetently, and the denunciations continued to accelerate. As the phenomenon spread, children began to play a crucial role. Not only were they reportedly victims of the witches' harmful magic, but hundreds of them also insisted that witches were taking them to the Devil's gatherings against their will. Presenting important archival discoveries, Lu Ann Homza restores the perspectives of illiterate, Basque-speaking individuals to the history of this shocking event and demonstrates what could happen when the Spanish Inquisition tried to take charge of a liminal space. Because the Spanish Inquisition was the body putting those accused of witchcraft on trial, modern scholars have depended upon Inquisition sources for their research. Homza's groundbreaking book combines new readings of the Inquisitional evidence with fresh archival finds from non-Inquisitional sources, including local secular and religious courts, and from notarial and census records. Expanding our understanding of this witch hunt as well as the history of children, community norms, and legal expertise in early modern Europe, Village Infernos and Witches' Advocates is required reading for students and scholars of the Spanish Inquisition and the history of witchcraft in early modern Europe.

In the late fourteenth century, the medieval Crown of Aragon experienced a series of food crises that created conflict and led to widespread starvation. Adam Franklin-Lyons applies contemporary understandings of complex human disasters, vulnerability, and resilience to explain how these famines occurred and to describe more accurately who suffered and why. Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon details the social causes and responses to three events of varying magnitude that struck the western Mediterranean: the minor food shortage of 1372, the serious but short-lived crisis of 1384-85, and the major famine of 1374-76, the worst famine of the century in the region. Shifts in military action, international competition, and violent attempts to control trade routes created systemic panic and widespread starvation-which in turn influenced decades of economic policy, social practices, and even the course of geopolitical conflicts, such as the War of the Two Pedros and the papal schism in Italy. Providing new insights into the intersecting factors that led to famine in the fourteenth-century Mediterranean, this deeply researched, convincingly argued book presents tools and models that are broadly applicable to any historical study of vulnerabilities in the human food supply. It will be of interest to scholars of medieval Iberia and the medieval Mediterranean as well as to historians of food and of economics.

In The Fight for Status and Privilege in Late Medieval and Early Modern Castile, 1465-1598, Michael Crawford investigates conflicts about and resistance to the status of hidalgo, conventionally understood as the lowest, most heavily populated rank in the Castilian nobility. It is generally accepted that legal privileges were based on status and class in this premodern society. Crawford presents and explains the contentious realities and limitations of such legal privileges, particularly the conventional claim of hidalgo exemption from taxation. He focuses on efforts to claim these privileges as well as opposing efforts to limit and manage them. Although historians of Spain acknowledge such conflicts, especially lawsuits associated with this status, none have focused a study on this extraordinarily widespread phenomenon. This book analyzes the inevitable contradictions inherent in negotiation for and the implementation of privilege, scrutinizing the many jurisdictions that intervened in these struggles and debates, including the crown, judiciary, city council, and financial authorities. Ultimately, this analysis imparts important insights about the nature of sixteenth-century Castilian society with wide-ranging implications about the relationship between social status and legal privileges in the early modern period as a whole.

The ability to forget the violent twentieth-century past was long seen as a virtue in Spain, even a duty. But the common wisdom has shifted as increasing numbers of Spaniards want to know what happened, who suffered, and who is to blame. Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War shows how historiography, fiction, and photography have shaped our views of the 1936-39 war and its long, painful aftermath. Faber traces the curious trajectories of iconic Spanish Civil War photographs by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour; critically reads a dozen recent Spanish novels and essays; interrogates basic scholarly assumptions about history, memory, and literature; and interviews nine scholars, activists, and documentarians who in the past decade and a half have helped redefine Spain's relationship to its past. In this book Faber argues that recent political developments in Spain-from the grassroots call for the recovery of historical memory to the indignados movement and the foundation of Podemos-provide an opportunity for scholars in the humanities to engage in a more activist, public, and democratic practice.