Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War.

The terrible months between the arrival of the Red Army on German soil and the final collapse of Hitler's regime were like no other in the Second World War. The Soviet Army's intent to take revenge for the horror that the Nazis had wreaked on their people produced a conflict of implacable brutality in which millions perished.
From the great battles that marked the Soviet conquest of East and West Prussia to the final surrender in the Vistula estuary, this book recounts in chilling detail the desperate struggle of soldiers and civilians alike. These brutal campaigns are brought vividly to life by a combination of previously unseen testimony and astute strategic analysis recognising a conflict of unprecedented horror and suffering.
Hardcover edition ISBN: 9781849081900

In this revised edition of A Short History of the Spanish Civil War, Julian Casanova tells the gripping story of the Spanish Civil War. Written in elegant and accessible prose, the book charts the most significant events and battles alongside the main players in the tragedy. Casanova provides answers to some of the pressing questions (such as the roots and extent of anticlerical violence) that have been asked in the 70 years that have passed since the painful defeat of the Second Republic. Now with a revised introduction, Casanova offers an overview of recent historiographical shifts; not least the wielding of the conflict to political ends in certain strands of contemporary historiography towards an alarming neo- Francoist revisionism. It is the ideal introduction to the Spanish Civil War.

The authors in this anthology explore how we are to rethink political and social narratives of the Spanish Civil War at the turn of the twenty-first century. The questions addressed here are based on a solid intellectual conviction of all the contributors to resist facile arguments both on the Right and the Left, concerning the historical and collective memory of the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship in the milieu of post-transition to democracy. Central to a true democratic historical narrative is the commitment to listening to the other experiences and the willingness to rethink our present(s) in light of our past(s). The volume is divided in six parts: I. Institutional Realms of Memory; II. Past Imperfect: Gender Archetypes in Retrospect; III. The Many Languages of Domesticity; IV. Realms of Oblivion: Hunger, Repression, and Violence; V. Strangers to Ourselves: Autobiographical Testimonies; and VI. The Orient Within: Myths of Hispano-Arabic Identity. Contributors are Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez, Alex Bueno, Fernando Martinez Lopez, Miguel Gomez Oliver, Mary Ann Dellinger, Geoffrey Jensen, Paula A. de la Cruz-Fernandez, Maria del Mar Logrono Narbona, M. Cinta Ramblado Minero, Deirdre Finnerty, Victoria L. Enders, Pilar Dominguez Prats, Sofia Rodriguez Lopez, Oscar Rodriguez Barreira, Nerea Aresti, and Miren Llona. Listed by Choice magazine as one of the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2014

The Spanish Civil War left a legacy of destruction, resentment and deep ideological divisions in a country that was attempting to recover from economic stagnation and social inequality. After Franco's victory, the repression and purge that ensued immersed Spain in a spiral of fear and silence which continued long after the dictator's death, through 'the pact of oblivion' that was observed during the transition to democracy. Memories of the Spanish Civil War: Conflict and Community in Rural Spain attempts to break this silence by recovering the local memories of survivors of the Civil War and the early years of Franco's dictatorship. Combining oral testimony gathered in one Andalusian village, with archival research, this ethnographic study approaches the expression of memory as an important site of socio-political struggle.

"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'.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 This book provides a comparative history of the domestic and international nature of Spain's First Carlist War (1833-40) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), as well as the impact of both conflicts. The book demonstrates how and why Spain's struggle for liberty was won in the 1830s only for it to be lost one hundred years later. It shows how both civil wars were world wars in miniature, fought in part by foreign volunteers under the gaze and in the political consciousness of the outside world. Prefaced by a short introduction, The Spanish Civil Wars is arranged into two domestic and international sections, each with three thematic chapters comparing each civil war in detail. The main analytical perspectives are political, social and new military history in nature, but they also explore aspects of gender, culture, nationalism and separatism, economy, religion and, especially, the war in its international context. The book integrates international archival research with the latest scholarship on both subjects and also includes a glossary, a bibliography and several images. It is a key resource tailored to the needs of students and scholars of modern Spain which offers an intriguing and original new perspective on the Spanish Civil War.

This book focuses on the short but crucial period that led to the collapse of the Spanish Republic and set the stage for the ensuing civil war. Stanley G. Payne, an internationally known scholar of modern Spanish history, details the political shifts that occurred from 1933 to 1936 and examines the actions and inactions of key actors during these years. Using their own memoirs, speeches, and declarations, he challenges previous perceptions of various major players, including President Alcalá Zamora.   The breakdown of political coalitions and the internal rifts between Spain’s bourgeois and labor classes sparked many instances of violent dissent in the mid-1930s. The book addresses the election of 1933 and the destabilizing insurrection that followed, Alcalá Zamora's failed attempts to control the major parties, and the backlash that resulted.  The alliances of the socialist left with communism and the right with fascism are also explored, as is the role of forces outside Spain in spurring the violence that eventually exploded into war.    

This narrative history tells the story of the German occupation of Normandy (1940-44), and the Allied liberation. Following the fall of France in 1940, Normandy formed part of the Reich's western border and its history for the next four years. On the coast, vast defenses were built up, and large numbers of German troops were stationed throughout the region, all in the midst of the local population. Much of the story is told in the words of French, German, and Allied participants, including last letters of executed hostages and resisters, accounts of everyday life and eyewitness reports of aerial, naval, and ground combat operations during the Liberation. When the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944, all were witness to the greatest amphibious landing in history. This, then, is the story of the 51-month-nightmare that was Normandy's war, told while it is still possible to record the personal stories of survivors, which very soon will not be the case.

Victor Dalmau is a young doctor when he is caught up in the Spanish Civil War, a tragedy that leaves his life - and the fate of his country - forever changed. Together with his sister-in-law, he is forced out of his beloved Barcelona and into exile in Chile. There, they find themselves enmeshed in a rich web of characters who come together in love and tragedy over the course of four generations, destined to witness the battle between freedom and repression as it plays out across the world.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, began a war that lasted nearly four years and created by far the bloodiest theater in World War II. In the conventional narrative of this war, Hitler was defeated by Stalin because, like Napoleon, he underestimated the size and resources of his enemy. In fact, says historian John Mosier, Hitler came very close to winning and lost only because of the intervention of the western Allies. Stalin's great triumph was not winning the war, but establishing the prevailing interpretation of the war. The Great Patriotic War, as it is known in Russia, would eventually prove fatal, setting in motion events that would culminate in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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Deathride "argues that the Soviet losses in World War II were unsustainable and would eventually have led to defeat. The Soviet Union had only twice the population of Germany at the time, but it was suffering a casualty rate more than two and a half times the German rate. Because Stalin had a notorious habit of imprisoning or killing anyone who brought him bad news (and often their families as well), Soviet battlefield reports were fantasies, and the battle plans Soviet generals developed seldom responded to actual circumstances. In this respect the Soviets waged war as they did everything else: through propaganda rather than actual achievement. What saved Stalin was the Allied decision to open the Mediterranean theater. Once the Allies threatened Italy, Hitler was forced to withdraw his best troops from the eastern front and redeploy them. In addition, the Allies provided heavy vehicles that the Soviets desperately needed and were unable to manufacture themselves. It was not the resources of the Soviet Union that defeated Hitler but the resources of the West.
In this provocative revisionist analysis of the war between Hitler and Stalin, Mosier provides a dramatic, vigorous narrative of events as he shows how most previous histories accepted Stalin's lies and distortions to produce a false sense of Soviet triumph. "Deathride "is the real story of the Eastern Front, fresh and different from what we thought we knew.

Written by experienced examiners and teachers and tailored to the new Edexcel specification. An active, engaging approach that brings History alive in the classroom! Exam tips, activities and sources in every chapter give students the confidence to tackle typical exam questions. Carefully written material ensures the right level of support at AS or A2. Our unique Exam Zone sections provide students with a motivating way to prepare for their exams.

This book explores the role of cultural heritage in post-conflict reconstruction, whether as a motor for the prolongation of violence or as a resource for building reconciliation. The research was driven by two main goals: first, to understand the post-conflict reconstruction process in terms of cultural heritage, and second, to identify how this process evolves in the medium term and the impact it has on society. The Spanish Civil War (193639) and its subsequent phases of reconstruction provides the primary material for this exploration. In pursuit of the first goal, the book centres on the material practices and rhetorical strategies developed around cultural heritage in post-civil war Spain and the victorious Franco regime's reconstruction. The analysis seeks to capture a discursively complex set of practices that made up the reconstruction and in which a variety of Spanish heritage sites were claimed, rebuilt or restored and represented in various ways as signs of historical narratives, political legitimacy and group identity. The reconstruction of the town of Gernika is a particularly emblematic instance of destruction and a significant symbol within the Basque regions of Spain as well as internationally. By examining Gernika it is possible to identify some of the trends common to the reconstruction as a whole along with those aspects that pertain to its singular symbolic resonance. In order to achieve the second goal, the processes of selection, value change and exclusionary dynamics of reconstruction and the responses it elicits are examined. Exploring the possible impact of post-civil war reconstruction in the medium term is conducted in two time frames: the period of political transition that followed General Franco's death in 1975; and the period 20042008, when Rodriguez Zapatero's government undertook initiatives to 'recover the historic memory' of the war and dictatorship. Finally, the observations made of the Spanish reconstruction are analysed in terms of how they might reveal general trends in post-conflict reconstruction processes in relation to cultural heritage. These insights are pertinent to the situations in Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Film, Memory and the Legacy of the Spanish Civil War reconstructs the legacy of the Spanish Civil War through an investigation of the anti-Franco guerrilla of the 1940s and 1950s. The book explores the memory of Spanish resistance fighters and their civilian supporters, concentrating on their cinematic representations in films and documentaries released between 1953 and 2010. This research fits within the emerging comparative field of Memory Studies, which has grown considerably in the last two decades. Along those lines, the efforts of civil society to understand and come to terms with the past have gathered momentum in twenty-first century Spain. One visible outcome of this determination has been the recovery of corpses from unmarked graves, which has been accompanied by a renewed interest in the cultural, historical, legal and archaeological traces of the millions who suffered under Franco's protracted dictatorship. This book sheds light especially on the silent roles played by women and children in the struggle against fascism.

This book focuses on an important but neglected aspect of the Spanish Civil War, the evolution of medical and surgical care of the wounded during the conflict. Importantly, the focus is from a mainly Spanish perspective - as the Spanish are given a voice in their own story, which has not always been the case. Central to the book is General Franco's treatment of Muslim combatants, the anarchist contribution to health, and the medicalisation of propaganda - themes that come together in a medico-cultural study of the Spanish Civil War. Suffusing the narrative and the analysis is the traumatic legacy of conflict, an untreated wound that a new generation of Spaniards are struggling to heal.

This book examines the internal controversies of the Roosevelt Administration in connection with Spain during World War II, the role of the President in these controversies, and the foundations of the policy that was followed from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War until the launching of Operation Torch in 1942.

This original analysis of the workings of Soviet state security organs under Lenin and Stalin addresses a series of questions that have long resisted satisfactory answers. Why did political repression affect so many people, most of them ordinary citizens? Why did repression come in waves or cycles? Why were economic and petty crimes regarded as political crimes? What was the reason for relying on extra-judicial tribunals? And what motivated the extreme harshness of punishments, including the widespread use of the death penalty? Through an approach that synthesizes history and economics, Paul Gregory develops systematic explanations for the way terror was applied, how terror agents were recruited, how they carried out their jobs, and how they were motivated. The book draws on extensive, recently opened archives of the Gulag administration, the Politburo, and state security agencies themselves to illuminate in new ways terror and repression in the Soviet Union as well as dictatorships in other times and places.

Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War is a history of art during wartime that analyzes images in various media that circulated widely and were encountered daily by Spaniards on city walls, in print, and in exhibitions. Tangible elements of the nation's past"monuments, cultural property, and art-historical icons"were displayed in temporary exhibitions and museums, as well as reproduced on posters and in print media, to rally the population, define national identity, and reinvent distant and recent history. Artists, political-party propagandists, and government administrators believed that images on the street, in print, and in exhibitions would create a community of viewers, brought together during the staging of public exhibitions to understand their own roles as Spaniards. This book draws on extensive archival research, brings to light unpublished documents, and examines visual propaganda, exhibitions, and texts unavailable in English. It engages with questions of national self-definition and historical memory at their intersections with the fine arts, visual culture, exhibition history, tourism, and propaganda during the Spanish Civil War and immediate post-war period, as well as contemporary responses to the contested legacy of the Spanish Civil War. It will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual and cultural history, history, and museum studies.

Through the eyes of a young American female radical socialist, living and working in Barcelona during the Catalan Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, the dreams, the nightmares and the realities of European politics in the age of dictatorship are fully brought to life. An autobiographical commentary written on the eve of World War Two.

A study of Eisenhower's policies during the second Berlin Crisis. The Soviet Berlin initiative marks an important epoch in the history of the Cold War. In 1958, it plunged the world into a crisis which at times evoked the danger of a global nuclear conflict. The author studies the diplomatic relationships with the American allies and the Soviet Union, together with the Western allies secret military contingency plans. The comparative approach allows the analysis to surmount the traditional barrier between military and diplomatic history and affords insights into the function of political and administrative institutions in the American government's decision-making process.

The Ukraine's emergence as an independent state in 1991 was not accompanied by violence due, it may be argued, to the weak national consciousness of most of its citizens. In part, this was the legacy of an historiography imposed by its rulers, who played down or ignored the Soviet Union's diversity and the past tensions among its peoples so as to legitimize a supranational "Soviet" identity.;The official history of the multinational state ruled from St Petersburg and Moscow bowdlerized the past and eroded the collective memory of each constituent nationality.;The author compares Soviet and Polish accounts of the Ukraine's past, examines how "national history" was written and how its interpretation changed in each country. This book provides an account of how historical writing was used to build and destroy nations and states, and is particularly relevant today in the light of recent events in Eastern Europe. By the author of "National History as Cultural Process".

A leading Yugoslav dissident offers valuable insights into the demise of communism and the bloody mayhem that followed in its wake.
The collapse of communism in Europe liberated Yugoslavia only to see it plunge into a brutal civil war between religious, ethnic, and nationalist factions. Why did communism's nonviolent end ignite a nationalist war that has exacted such a high price in human suffering?
International affairs scholar Svetozar Stojanovi? a member of the famous Praxis group that resisted the communists has studied the developments in his war-torn homeland. He examines the internal and external factors that forced the transition from communist rule to democracy and a free-market economy. His insider's, behind-the-scenes look at the internal power struggles that pull factions in various directions, examines the cultural weaknesses of communism, the "capitalist encirclement" of Marxist-socialist economies, communism's ideological decay, and the roles played by Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The Fall of Yugoslavia also examines the international reaction to these historic developments. Stojanovi? urges the West not to fall victim to a "triumphalistic temptation," with as yet unforeseen consequences, but to anticipate and face the problems in this volatile Yugoslav region.

How do post-communist museums and cinema contribute to shaping the image of a communist past in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe? This is the first systematic analysis of the use of visual techniques in grasping what the previous regime means. After the past was lost in 1989 in the former communist world, museums and memorials started mushrooming all over East and Central Europe. While reflecting on possible, actual meanings of the lost history the aim of shaping public opinion and discourse of the recent communist past also became apparent. Most of these undertakings - movies included - tried hard to make political use of recollections of the earlier world, and employed select tools from contemporary museological, memorializing and new-media practice to make their politicized intent historically credible. Thirteen essays from scholars in the region deal with the use of new media in shaping and fashioning popular perception of the previous era, and provide a fresh approach to the subject.