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Books > History > European history > From 1900 > General
In 1941, the Franco regime established the Spanish Division of
Volunteers to take part in the Russian campaign as a unit
integrated into the German Wehrmacht. Recruited by both the Fascist
Party (Falange) and the Spanish army, around 47,000 Spanish
volunteers joined what would become known as the "Blue Division."
The Spanish Blue Division on the Eastern Front, 1941-1945 explores
an intimate history of the Blue Division "from below," using
personal war diaries, letters, and memoirs, as well as official
documents from military archives in Spain, Germany, Britain, and
Russia. In addition to describing the Spanish experience on the
Eastern Front, Xose M. Nunez Seixas takes on controversial topics
including the Blue Division's proximity to the Holocaust and how
members of the Blue Division have been remembered and commemorated.
Addressing issues such as the behaviour of the Spaniards as
occupiers, their perception by the Russians, their witnessing of
the Holocaust, their commitment to the war aims of Nazi Germany,
and their narratives on the war after 1945, this book illuminates
the experience of Spanish combatants and occupied civilians.
"Mothers! Women! When the years pass by and the wounds of war are
stanched; when the memory of the sad and bloody days dissipates in
a present of liberty, of peace and of wellbeing...speak to your
children. Tell them of these men of the International Brigades."
Dolores Ibarruri, 'La Pasionaria, ' Madrid 1938. Almost 200
Welshmen volunteered to join the International Brigade and
travelled to Spain to fight fascism with the Republicans during the
1936-1939 Spanish Civil War. Whilst over 150 returned home, at
least 35 died during the brutal conflict. You Are Legend is their
remarkable story. Lovingly and thoroughly researched by Graham
Davies, You Are Legend outlines the motives, values, and actions of
the volunteers from Wales by exploring the social, cultural,
religious, and political context of Wales during the 1930s. It also
provides a fascinating insight into who they were and their
political backgrounds, and follows their journeys to Spain and
their experiences in a series of key battles fought by the British
Battalion before documenting their deaths or safe return to Wales.
Politically active as trade unionists, members of the Communist or
Labour parties, and hunger marchers, many were unemployed miners
and most were working class with the fighting spirit of the
coalfield and the impoverished. Unprepared and sometimes
incredulous, these volunteers became immersed in a civil war which
created a rupture in the heart of Spain that has never fully
healed. You Are Legend is the first book to fully document all of
the Welsh volunteers.
On October 1, 2017, the Spanish police assault on Catalans voting
in a peaceful referendum shot Catalonia's struggle for independence
onto the world's front pages. Today, those two million-plus voters
have neither forgiven nor forgotten: the struggle continues.
Catalonia's national consciousness has deep roots. A People's
History of Catalonia tells this small country's history, from
below, in all its richness and complexity. Catalonia's struggles
for freedom have, for centuries, been violently resisted; and its
language and rights, suppressed. Since the nineteenth century, the
fight for national sovereignty has often intertwined with
working-class mobilisation for social justice. Barcelona became
known as the Rose of Fire. In 1936 Catalonia saw one of history's
most profound workers' revolutions. From the peasant revolts of the
15th century and the siege of Barcelona in 1714, through the
explosive workers' movement led by anarchists, the defeat in the
Spanish Civil War, to the anti-Franco resistance in the grim years
that followed, the author tells a compelling story whose ending has
yet to be written.
The Spanish Civil War was fought on land and at sea but also in an
age of great interest in air warfare and the rapid development of
warplanes. The war in Spain came a turning point in the development
of military aircraft and was the arena in which new techniques of
air war were rehearsed including high-speed dogfights, attacks on
ships, bombing of civilian areas and tactical air-ground
cooperation. At the heart of the air war were the Condor Legion, a
unit composed of military personnel from Hitler's Germany who
fought for Franco's Nationalists in Spain. In this book, Michael
Alpert provides the first study in English of the Spanish Civil War
in the air. He describes and analyses the intervention of German,
Italian and Soviet aircraft in the Spanish conflict, as well as the
supply of aircraft in general and the role of volunteer and
mercenary airmen. His book provides new perspectives on the air war
in Spain, the precedents set for World War II and the possible
lessons learnt.
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 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.
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.
Foreign volunteers fought on behalf of General Franco and the
Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War for a right-wing cause whose
aim was to smash democracy. These assorted adventurers, fascists,
and Catholic crusaders were on the winning side, but their role has
remained strangely hidden until now. Men from Portugal and Morocco
signed on for money and adventure. General Eoin O'Duffy organised
700 Irishmen in a modern Crusade; 500 Catholic Frenchmen fought in
the 'Jeanne D'Arc' unit; and thirty British volunteers, including
aristocrats and working-class fascists, also took up arms. Romanian
Iron Guard extremists died at Majadahonda and an Indian volunteer
fought in the fascist militia. There were Russians, Americans,
Finns, Belgians, Greeks, Cubans, and many more. Goose-stepping
alongside the volunteers were fascist conscripts from Germany and
Italy, in training for the next world war. Foreigners, whether
unknown individuals like British pilot Cecil Bebb or infamous
figures like the German dictator Adolf Hitler, were essential to
Franco's victory. Without Bebb - - who flew General Francisco
Franco from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco in 1936, a
journey which was to precipitate the onset of the Spanish Civil War
- - the war would never have started; without Hitler, Franco would
never have won.
In this distinctive new history of the origins of the Spanish Civil
War, James Simpson and Juan Carmona tackle the highly-debated issue
of why it was that Spain's democratic Second Republic failed. They
explore the interconnections between economic growth, state
capacity, rural social mobility and the creation of mass
competitive political parties, and how these limited the
effectiveness of the new republican governments, and especially
their attempts to tackle economic and social problems within the
agricultural sector. They show how political change during the
Republic had a major economic impact on the different groups in
village society, leading to social conflicts that turned to
polarization and finally, with the civil war, to violence and
brutality. The democratic Republic failed not so much because of
the opposition from the landed elites, but rather because small
farmers had been unable to exploit more effectively their newly
found political voice.
In this distinctive new history of the origins of the Spanish Civil
War, James Simpson and Juan Carmona tackle the highly-debated issue
of why it was that Spain's democratic Second Republic failed. They
explore the interconnections between economic growth, state
capacity, rural social mobility and the creation of mass
competitive political parties, and how these limited the
effectiveness of the new republican governments, and especially
their attempts to tackle economic and social problems within the
agricultural sector. They show how political change during the
Republic had a major economic impact on the different groups in
village society, leading to social conflicts that turned to
polarization and finally, with the civil war, to violence and
brutality. The democratic Republic failed not so much because of
the opposition from the landed elites, but rather because small
farmers had been unable to exploit more effectively their newly
found political voice.
This book explores the attitudes of the Spanish army officer corps
towards the evolution of warfare during the early decades of the
twentieth century, and their influence on the armies of the Spanish
Civil War. It examines how the Spanish military coped with
technological innovations such as the machine gun and the tank, how
it adapted the armys battlefield doctrine to changes in warfare
before the Civil War, and the influence of this doctrine on the
outcome of the conflict. Of the different armed forces that fought
in the Spanish Civil War, it is paradoxically the Spanish army that
remains most forgotten - especially its military doctrine.
Scholarship on the Spanish military in this period focuses on its
politics, ideology and institutional reforms, touching upon 'hard'
professional issues only superficially, if at all. Based on
original research and using largely unstudied Spanish primary
sources, this book fills a major scholarly gap in the history of
the Spanish army and the Spanish Civil War.
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.
Conspiracy, Coup detat and Civil War in Seville, 19361939 dissects
the conspiracy against the democratic Second Spanish Republic in
the context of the uprising and civil war in Seville, the capital
of Spains largest region, Andalusia, and the most populous urban
centre seized by the military rebels during the coup detat of July
1936. As the major industrial and economic centre in insurgent
Spain, Seville remains central to understanding the rebels
repressive project, for this Andalusian province witnessed the
highest number of extra-judicial assassinations throughout the war.
This is the first book in any language to bring together the
subject of the civil war in Seville, the career of one of the most
influential leaders of the rebel faction, General Queipo de Llano,
and Francoisms most resilient myth. It dismantles, one by one, a
series of carefully constructed narratives employed as rhetorical
weapons to justify both the rebellion and the murderous rule of
Queipo de Llano. The size and importance of the city meant that it
became a critical battleground in the struggle for political
legitimacy and it remains so for Spains on-going memory wars, a
series of public and academic disputes over the historical memory
of the Franco regime. Ruben Serem examines the socio-economic
context of Queipos great purge, the painful transition from
democracy to autocracy and the political nature of the generals
rule in Andalusia. In doing so, this work demonstrates how several
features of Queipos system of government were enthusiastically
embraced by the nascent Francoist state, hence Sevilles unenviable
status as a Laboratory of Terror.
In the thriving urban economies of late thirteenth-century
Catalonia, Jewish and Christian women labored to support their
families and their communities. The Fruit of Her Hands examines how
gender, socioeconomic status, and religious identity shaped how
these women lived and worked. Sarah Ifft Decker draws on thousands
of notarial contracts as well as legal codes, urban ordinances, and
Hebrew responsa literature to explore the lived experiences of
Jewish and Christian women in the cities of Barcelona, Girona, and
Vic between 1250 and 1350. Relying on an expanded definition of
women's work that includes the management of household resources as
well as wage labor and artisanal production, this study highlights
the crucial contributions women made both to their families and to
urban economies. Christian women, Ifft Decker finds, were deeply
embedded in urban economic life in ways that challenge traditional
dichotomies between women in northern and Mediterranean Europe. And
while Jewish women typically played a less active role than their
Christian counterparts, Ifft Decker shows how, in moments of
communal change and crisis, they could and did assume prominent
roles in urban economies. Through its attention to the distinct
experiences of Jewish and Christian women, The Fruit of Her Hands
advances our understanding of Jewish acculturation in the Iberian
Peninsula and the shared experiences of women of different faiths.
It will be welcomed by specialists in gender studies and religious
studies as well as students and scholars of medieval Iberia.
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.
Through case studies of prominent cultural products, this book
takes a longitudinal approach to the influence and
conceptualization of the Civil War in democratic Spain. Stafford
explores the stories told about the war during the transition to
democracy and how these narratives have morphed in light of the
polemics about historical memory.
On May 20, 1938, a young man from the Bronx informs his parents
that he is leaving for the Catskills to begin his new job as a
waiter. Instead, he sails for Europe to join the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, the opening round in the fight
against Hitler and Mussolini. The man, Dave Lipton-the author's
uncle-sends letter after letter home detailing his hopes and
begging for forgiveness. He never receives a reply.Decades later,
Eunice Lipton stumbles upon clues for this silence, uncovering
details of Dave's exhilarating political life in New York, his
shuttered romantic life, and his deep friendship with another
volunteer. A Distant Heartbeat tells a tale of passion and heroism,
centered on a fierce competition between brothers, a packet of
missing letters, and the unforeseen results of family betrayal.
September 1938. Spain's Civil War has been raging for two years,
the outcome still in the balance. But rebel General Franco is so
confident of winning that he has opened up battlefield tourism
along the country's north coast. Jack Telford, a left-wing
reporter, finds himself with an eccentric group of touristson one
of the War Route's yellow Chrysler buses. Driven by his passion for
peace, Telford attempts to uncover the hidden truths beneath the
conflict. But Jack must contend first with his own gullibility, the
tragic death of a fellow passenger, capture by Republican
guerrilleros, a final showdown at Spain's most holy shrine and the
possibility that he has been badly betrayed. Betrayed and in
serious danger.
Few characters in history are as fascinating or controversial as
Nicholas and Alexandra. From their passionate love to their
horrifying execution, they are alternately viewed as innocent
victims of Bolshevik assassins or blamed for causing the Revolution
themselves. Much has already been written about their lives. But
acting as a curator of the many conflicting histories, acclaimed
author Virginia Rounding offers a different kind of biography, with
an intimate look that probes the souls of these unforgettable
figures, and tells the story of their passion and its consequences
for Russia. Through newly revealed letters and diaries, Rounding
explores the Empress' ill health, examines the enigmatic triangular
relationship between Nicky, Alix and her confidante Ania Vyrubova,
and looks anew at the reasons behind their reliance on the infamous
Rasputin. Her conclusions are surprising. With eloquence and
compassion, Rounding makes these characters come alive, presenting
them in all their complexity and ardour, guiding the reader into
their vanished world.
This book presents an original new history of the most important
conflict in European affairs during the 1930s, prior to the events
that produced World War II 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 in detail the development of
Franco's counterrevolutionary dictatorship. Payne gives attention
to the multiple meanings and interpretations of war and examines
why the conflict provoked such strong reactions in its own 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 and in comparative
perspective of revolutionary civil wars of the twentieth century."
During the first few days of the Spanish Civil War, women played an
integral role in the spontaneous uprising that prevented the
immediate success of the Nationalist coup. Around one thousand of
these women went on to join the militias who fought at the front.
Women also played an important role in the defense of cities, with
another several thousand forming sections of the armed rearguard.
Indeed, women s participation in the anti-fascist resistance
constituted one of the greatest mass political mobilizations of
women in Spain s history. Milicianas provides a comprehensive
picture of what life was like for the women who fought during the
first year of the civil war, focusing on how the women themselves
viewed this experience. It demonstrates that the significance of
the miliciana phenomenon lies in the fact that these women took up
arms in relatively large numbers, were self-motivated, participated
in combat equally with their male comrades, and played an extensive
and sophisticated military role. By late 1936, attitudes towards
women in combat began to change drastically, and by March 1937, the
majority of milicianas had been removed from their combat
positions. Though there existed a consensus around this issue among
the male leadership of both the Republican government and left-wing
political groups, female combatants viewed this turn of events
differently. The majority of the milicianas had deep reservations
about their recall from the front, and saw it as a retreat from the
gains women had made during the war and revolution. Indeed, while
the political leadership within the Republic presented numerous
arguments for why it was necessary to remove women from combat,
this book argues that the reason it was initially considered
acceptable for women to fight, and then seen as undesirable eight
months later, was connected to the course of the social revolution.
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.
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