The year 1492 has long divided the study of Sephardic culture into two distinct periods, before and after the expulsion of Jews from Spain. David A. Wacks examines the works of Sephardic writers from the 13th to the 16th centuries and shows that this literature was shaped by two interwoven experiences of diaspora: first from the Biblical homeland Zion and later from the ancestral hostland, Sefarad. Jewish in Spain and Spanish abroad, these writers negotiated Jewish, Spanish, and diasporic idioms to produce a uniquely Sephardic perspective. Wacks brings Diaspora Studies into dialogue with medieval and early modern Sephardic literature for the first time.

"It was bright moonlight -- good bombing light -- and once we had to stop and put out our lights as a Fascist aeroplane flew over. They usually come swooping down with guns firing at cars, especially ambulances. Finally we arrived at a town among the hills about 12.30pm. Here there is a hospital of about 100 beds in a former convent. They expect an attack tonight". In these words New Zealand nurse Dorothy Morris described her journey to a Republican medical unit of the Spanish civil war in early 1937. This book is based on the vivid, detailed and evocative letters she sent from Spain and other European countries. They have been supplemented by wide-ranging research to record a life of outstanding professional dedication, resourcefulness and courage. Dorothy Aroha Morris (1904-1988) volunteered to serve with Sir George Young's University Ambulance Unit, and worked at an International Brigades base hospital and as head nurse to a renowned Catalan surgeon. She then headed a Quaker-funded children's hospital in Murcia, southern Spain. As Franco's forces advanced, she fled to France and directed Quaker relief services for tens of thousands of Spanish refugees. Nurse Morris spent the Second World War in London munitions factories, as welfare supervisor to their all-female workforces. She then joined the newly formed UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, working in the Middle East and Germany with those who had been displaced and made homeless and destitute as a result of the war. Dorothy Morris's remarkable and pioneering work in the fields of military medicine for civilian casualties, and large-scale humanitarian relief projects is told in this book for the first time. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

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.

Right-Wing Spain in the Civil War Era explores the lives of the leading Spanish conservatives in the turbulent period 1914-1945. The volume is a collection of biographies of the most important figures of the Spanish Right during the last years of the Restoration (1914-1923), the Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), the Second Republic (1931-1936), the Civil War (1936-39) and the early years of the Franco regime (1939-45). This book brings together a number of leading historians of twentieth-century Spain. By adopting a biographical approach, the volume aims at providing a new insight of the origins, development and aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Contrary to the traditional view, Right-Wing Spain in the Civil War Era shows a diverse and fragmented Spanish right which, far from being isolated, was profoundly influenced by German Nazism, Italian Fascism and French Traditionalism. This remarkable and innovative collection of essays will be welcomed by students and lecturers of Spanish history alike.

This book examines the human consequences (individual, social, cultural, and economic) of civil war and political repression in Castilleja del Campo, a town in southern Spain with barely more than 600 inhabitants today. The narrow geographical focus allows for a coherent chronological narrative with relevance to current public issues such as the unequal distribution of wealth, political polarisation, the violation of human rights, government surveillance of civilian populations, and extra-legal detentions, torture and executions. The declarations of eyewitnesses are complemented by personal documents, contemporary newspaper accounts, and documents from the town's municipal archive and other archives in the province of Seville. The work presents the events from the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in April 1931 onward from multiple points of view and analyses the interactions among a gallery of characters: Republican and pro-Franco mayors and councilmen; union leaders and affiliates; members of the fascist-inspired Spanish Falange; the schoolteacher; the priest; widows and orphans of the men who were shot; administrators and managers of the estates of the nobles; shaved women paraded through the streets; combatants; day labourers; civil guards; black marketeers; prisoners. Placing these characters and events in their provincial, regional, and national context, the town becomes a microcosm that reflects the experience of Spain during those traumatic years. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

Salud! reviews the enormously valuable contribution of the volunteers who left Britain to serve with the Republican Medical Services during the Spanish Civil War. Acknowledgement is given to the immense effort and self-sacrifice made by men and women from all walks of life who, working ceaselessly in the rearguard, made it possible for the medical teams to function in Spain. Such was the case in Britain where, in spite of the government's official policy of non-intervention, there was a campaign of fervent support for the legitimate Republican government. The first British Medical Unit in Spain had immense political significance for the Spanish Republic. Barely a month into the start of the civil war and this small group was the first visible sign of international support. It would later become part of the Republican Medical Service and, within that, of the Medical Service of the International Brigades. Not only did volunteers help to create and to maintain an emergency medical service, some of the individuals involved were also responsible for important developments that were of relevance to later military-medical practice and also to the history of medicine in general. Medical personnel generally worked in dreadful conditions, for hours and even days without rest, and with a lack of equipment and provisions of all kinds. They were mostly young and inexperienced men and women who suddenly found themselves thrown together in desperate circumstances, with the task of salvaging something of life amidst the inhumanity and mayhem. That they rose to the challenge is, in itself, worthy of tribute. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish.

Salud! reviews the enormously valuable contribution of the volunteers who left Britain to serve with the Republican Medical Services during the Spanish Civil War. Acknowledgement is given to the immense effort and self-sacrifice made by men and women from all walks of life who, working ceaselessly in the rearguard, made it possible for the medical teams to function in Spain. Such was the case in Britain where, in spite of the government's official policy of non-intervention, there was a campaign of fervent support for the legitimate Republican government. The first British Medical Unit in Spain had immense political significance for the Spanish Republic. Barely a month into the start of the civil war and this small group was the first visible sign of international support. It would later become part of the Republican Medical Service and, within that, of the Medical Service of the International Brigades. Not only did volunteers help to create and to maintain an emergency medical service, some of the individuals involved were also responsible for important developments that were of relevance to later military-medical practice and also to the history of medicine in general. Medical personnel generally worked in dreadful conditions, for hours and even days without rest, and with a lack of equipment and provisions of all kinds. They were mostly young and inexperienced men and women who suddenly found themselves thrown together in desperate circumstances, with the task of salvaging something of life amidst the inhumanity and mayhem. That they rose to the challenge is, in itself, worthy of tribute. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish.

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.

Olivia Munoz-Rojas critically examines the wartime destruction and post-war rebuilding of three prominent sites in Madrid, Bilbao and Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. Each case highlights different dimensions of the material impact of the conflict, the practical challenges of reconstruction and the symbolic uses of the two processes by the winning side. The books reveals aspects of the Spanish Civil War and the evolution of the Franco regime from an original and fruitful angle as well as more general insights into the topic of wartime destruction and post-war reconstruction of cities. The title -- Ashes and Granite -- aims to capture, visually and texturally, on the one hand, the damage caused by the war and, on the other, the Franco regime's concept of the ideal Hispanic construction material. Written from an interdisciplinary perspective at the intersection of urban and political history and theory, planning and architecture, the book draws largely on unpublished archival material. Key features of the Franco regime's rebuilding programme are considered, such as the priority given to rural reconstruction and the persistent search for a national architectural style. The case of Madrid centres on the failure of the Falange's ambitious plans for a neo-imperial capital as illustrative of the regime's gradual shift from state planning to privately driven urban development. The case of Bilbao focuses on the reconstruction of the bridges of the city to demonstrate how, occasionally, the regime managed to turn destruction and reconstruction into opportunities for successfully marking the beginning of what was perceived as a new era in Spain's history. Finally, the opening of Avenida de la Catedral in Barcelona exemplifies how wartime destruction sometimes facilitated the implementation of controversial planning, acting as a catalyst for urban redevelopment. Moreover, the opening of the avenue contributed to the disclosure of the ancient Roman city-wall, allowing the regime to appropriate the ancient legacy symbolically. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies.

Between Stalin's death in 1953 and 1960, the government of the Soviet Union released hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag as part of a wide-ranging effort to reverse the worst excesses and abuses of the previous two decades and revive the spirit of the revolution. This exodus included not only victims of past purges but also those sentenced for criminal offenses.

In Khrushchev's Cold Summer, Miriam Dobson explores the impact of these returnees on communities and, more broadly, Soviet attempts to come to terms with the traumatic legacies of Stalin's terror. Confusion and disorientation undermined the regime's efforts at recovery. In the wake of Stalin's death, ordinary citizens and political leaders alike struggled to make sense of the country's recent bloody past and to cope with the complex social dynamics caused by attempts to reintegrate the large influx of returning prisoners, a number of whom were hardened criminals alienated and embittered by their experiences within the brutal camp system.

Drawing on private letters as well as official reports on the party and popular mood, Dobson probes social attitudes toward the changes occurring in the first post-Stalin decade. Throughout, she features personal stories as articulated in the words of ordinary citizens, prisoners, and former prisoners. At the same time, she explores Soviet society's contradictory responses to the returnees and shows that for many the immediate post-Stalin years were anything but a breath of spring air after the long Stalinist winter.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal is regarded today as the democratic ideal, a triumphant American response to a crisis that forced Germany and Italy toward National Socialism and Fascism. Yet in the 1930s, before World War II, the regimes of Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler bore fundamental similarities. In this groundbreaking work, Wolfgang Schivelbusch investigates the shared elements of these three "new deals"--focusing on their architecture and public works projects--to offer a new explanation for the popularity of Europe's totalitarian systems. Writing with flair and concision, Schivelbusch casts a different light on the New Deal and puts forth a provocative explanation for the still-mysterious popularity of Europe's most tyrannical regimes.

Introduction by Garret Fitzgerald. This book seeks to interpret the events of Easter Week 1916 as the central defining event of a 'long revolution' in Irish history. The origins of the long revolution lie in the second half of the nineteenth century, and its legacy is still being played out in the first years of the twenty-first century.Acknowledged experts on specific topics seek to explore the layered domestic and international, political, legal and moral aspects of this uniquely influential and controversial event.Contributors are: Rory O' Dwyer, Michael Wheatley, Brendan O'Shea and Gerry White, D.G. Boyce, Francis M. Carroll, Rosemary Cullen Owens, J r me aan de Wiel, Adrian Hardiman, Keith Jeffery, Mary McAleese, Owen McGee, Seamus Murphy and Brian P. Murphy.

The surveillance of immigrants and potential terrorists preoccupies leaders throughout the industrialized world. Yet these concerns are hardly new. Policing Paris examines a critical moment in the history of immigration control and political surveillance. Drawing on massive police archives and other materials, Clifford Rosenberg shows how in the years after the Great War the French police, terrified by the Bolshevik Revolution and the specter of immigrant criminality, became the first major force anywhere systematically to enforce distinctions of citizenship and national origins. As the French capital emerged as a haven for refugees, dissidents, and workers from throughout Europe and across the Mediterranean in the 1920s, police officers raided immigrant neighborhoods to scare illegal aliens into registering with authorities and arrested those whose papers were not in order. The police began to concentrate on colonial workers from North Africa, tracking these workers with a special police brigade and segregating them in their own hospital when they fell ill. Transformed by their enforcement, legal categories that had existed for hundreds of years began to matter as never before. They determined whether or not families could remain together and whether people could keep their jobs or were forced to flee. During World War II, identity controls marked out entire populations for physical destruction. The treatment of foreigners during the Third Republic, Rosenberg contends, shaped the subsequent treatment of Jews by Vichy. At the same time, however, he argues that the new methods of identification pioneered between the wars are more directly relevant to the present day. They created forms of inclusion and inequality that remain pervasive, as industrial welfare states around the world find themselves compelled to provide benefits to their own citizens and recruit foreign nationals to satisfy their labor needs.

In this important historical account of the role that religion played in defining the political life of a modern national society, Paul A. Hanebrink shows how Hungarian nationalists redefined Hungary a liberal society in the nineteenth century as a narrowly "Christian" nation in the aftermath of World War I. Drawing on impressive archival research, Hanebrink uncovers how political and religious leaders demanded that "Christian values" influence public life while insisting that religion should never be reduced to the status of a simple nationalist symbol.

In Defense of Christian Hungary also explores the emergence of the idea that a destructive "Jewish spirit" was the national enemy. In combining the historical study of antisemitism with more recent considerations of religion and nationalism, Hanebrink addresses an important question in Central European historiography: how nations that had been inclusive of Jews before World War I became rabidly antisemitic during the interwar period. As he traces the crucial and complex legacy of religion's role in shaping exclusionary antisemitic politics in Hungary, Hanebrink follows the process from its origins in the 1890s to the Holocaust and beyond.

More broadly, In Defense of Christian Hungary squarely addresses the relationship between antisemitic words and antisemitic violence and between religion and racial politics, deeply contested issues in the history of twentieth-century Europe. The Hungarian example is a chilling demonstration of how religious nationalism can find a home even within a pluralist and tolerant civil society."

In most countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fall of communism opened up the possibility for individuals to acquire land. Based on Katherine Verdery's extensive fieldwork between 1990 and 2001, The Vanishing Hectare explores the importance of land and land ownership to the people of one Transylvanian community, Aurel Vlaicu. Verdery traces how collectivized land was transformed into private property, how land was valued, what the new owners were able to do with it, and what it signified to each of the different groups vying for land rights.

Verdery tells this story about transforming socialist property forms in a global context, showing the fruitfulness of conceptualizing property as a political symbol, as a complex of social relations among people and things, and as a process of assigning value. This book is a window on rural life after socialism but it also provides a framework for assessing the neo-liberal economic policies that have prevailed elsewhere, such as in Latin America. Verdery shows how the trajectory of property after socialism was deeply conditioned by the forms property took in socialism itself; this is in contrast to the image of a "tabula rasa" that governed much thinking about post-socialist property reform.

For centuries the histories of France and Germany have been linked in ways productive and destructive, and each nation's sense of itself has often been shaped by admiration of or hostility toward the other. Harold Mah explores the interweaving paths of German and French cultural identity that emerged in the Enlightenment and continued through the 19th century and into the 20th. formulate stable cultural identities constantly collapsed in the face of other powerful images and the rush of history. In Mah's view, these shifting conceptions of cultural identity are problematic phantasies, internally unstable and prone to falling apart under the pressure of events, only to be replaced by new, equally problematic constructions. Mah offers fresh analyses of a wide range of iconic texts and artworks, including those of Jacques-Louis David, de Stael, Diderot and Rousseau in France and Goethe, Hegel, Herder, Mann, Marx and Nietzsche in Germany. in issues of language, gender, classical revival, politics and modernity. Enlightenment Phantasies presents the shaping of cultural identity in narratives accessible not only to specialists but also to students and all readers concerned with the history of Western culture.

Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a region Bolsheviks saw as primitive and backward. The Soviets focused on women and the family in an effort to forge a new, "liberated" social order.This unveiling campaign, however, took place in the context of a half-century of Russian colonization and the long-standing suspicion of rural Muslim peasants toward an urban, colonial state. Widespread resistance to the idea of unveiling quickly appeared and developed into a broader anti-Soviet animosity among Uzbeks of both sexes. Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over indigenous practices of veiling and seclusion. New local and national identities coalesced around these very practices that had been placed under attack. Veils became powerful anticolonial symbols for the Uzbek nation as well as important markers of Muslim propriety. Bolshevik leaders, who had seen this campaign as an excellent way to enlist allies while proving their own European credentials as enlightened reformers, thus inadvertently strengthened the seclusion of Uzbek women precisely the reverse of what they set out to do. Northrop's fascinating and evocative book shows both the fluidity of Central Asian cultural practices and the real limits that existed on Stalinist authority, even during the ostensibly totalitarian 1930s."

Meet the inspirational woman behind the much-publicized emergency medical evacuations of wounded children from war-torn Sarajevo At the height of the Serbian siege of Sarajevo, Ellen Blackman could no longer bear the televised images of wounded children desperate for medical care. So she set off for Bosnia. There she shared the tragedies and occasional triumphs of a brave people whose world was crumbling around them while a seemingly indifferent world stood by. And despite tremendous bureaucratic and dangerous obstacles, she got the children out.

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.

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.