The Second Spanish Republic (193136) was the only new liberal democratic regime to emerge in Europe during the 1930s. Historians, however, have focused primarily on the Civil War of 193639 that followed, devoting much less attention to the parliamentary regime that preceded it. This book deals with the history and failure of the democratic polity in Spain through a detailed examination of the initiatives of its president, Niceto Alcala Zamora. As civil servant, lawyer, politician and writer, by 1931 he had become one of the most successful men of Spain. He played the leading role in the downfall of the monarchy and the inauguration of the Republic, which he served for eight months as initial prime minister and then as the first president. Stanley Paynes study argues that the failure of the Republic was not inevitable but depended on the policy choices of its president and the key party leaders. Alcala Zamoras professed goal was to center the Republic, stabilizing the new regime while avoiding extremes, but he failed altogether in this project. The Constitution of 1931 stipulated the double responsibility of parliamentary government both to the president and to a voting majority. Though Alcala Zamora resisted strong efforts from the left to cancel the results of the first fully democratic elections in 1933, he subsequently used his powers recklessly, making and unmaking governments at will, refusing to permit normal functioning of parliament. This first critical scholarly account of the presidency of Alcala Zamora casts new light on the failure of democracy in interwar Europe and on the origins of the Spanish Civil War.

The Spanish Civil War, a military rebellion supported by Hitler and Mussolini, attracted the greatest writers of the age. Among them were Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Andre Malraux, Arthur Koestler, Langston Hughes, and Martha Gellhorn. They returned to their homelands to warn the world about a war of fascist aggression looming on the horizon. Spain's cause drew 35,000 volunteers from 52 countries, including 2,800 Americans who formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Eight hundred Americans lost their lives. Of them, Hemingway wrote, "no men entered earth more honourably than those who died in Spain." Writers and soldiers alike saw Spain as the first battlefield of World War II. In the title essay of this book, historian Peter N. Carroll traces the war's legacy, from the shocking bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by German and Italian air forces to the attacks on civilians and displacement of refugees in later wars. Carroll's work focuses on both the personal and political motives that led seemingly ordinary Americans to risk their lives in a foreign war. Based on extensive oral histories of surviving veterans and original archival work-including material in the once-secret Moscow archives-the essays, some never before published, present forty years of scholarship. A portrait of three American women illustrates the growing awareness of a fascist threat to our home front. Other pieces examine the role of ethnicity, race, and religion in prompting Americans to set off for war. Carroll also examines the lives of war survivors. Novelist Alvah Bessie became a screenwriter and emerged as one of the blacklisted "Hollywood Ten." Ralph Fasanella went from union organizing to becoming one of the country's significant "outsider" painters. Hank Rubin won fame as a food connoisseur and wine columnist. And one volunteer, the African American Sgt. Edward Carter, earned a Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism in World War II. Most famously, Ernest Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. His sharp criticism of the film version of the novel, in a series of private letters published here for the first time in book form, reveals his deep commitment to the antifascist cause. For those who witnessed the war in Spain, the defeat of democracy remained, in the words of Albert Camus, "a wound in the heart." From Guernica to Human Rights is essential reading for anyone interested in the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.

The unexpected and moving story of an American journalist who works to uncover her family's long-buried Jewish ancestry in Spain.
Raised a Catholic in California, "New York Times "journalist Doreen Carvajal is shocked when she discovers that her background may actually be connected to "conversos "from Inquisition-era Spain: Jews who were forced to renounce their faith and convert to Christianity or face torture and death. With vivid childhood memories of Sunday sermons, catechism, and the rosary, Carvajal travels to the centuries-old Andalucian town of Arcos de la Frontera, to investigate her lineage and recover her family's original religious heritage.
In Arcos, Carvajal comes to realize that fear remains a legacy of the Inquisition along with the cryptic messages left by its victims. Back at her childhood home in California, she uncovers papers documenting a family of Carvajals who were burned at the stake in the 16th-century territory of Mexico. Could the author's family history be linked to the hidden history of Arcos? And could the unfortunate Carvajals have been her ancestors?
As she strives to find proof that her family had been forced to convert to Christianity six hundred years ago, Carvajal comes to understand that the past flows like a river through time--and that while the truth might be submerged, it is never truly lost.

In 1938 the United States was embroiled in a vicious debate between supporters of the two sides of the Spanish Civil War, who sought either to lift or to retain the U.S. arms embargo on Spain. The embargo, which favoured Gen. Francisco Franco's Nationalist regime over the ousted Republican government of the Loyalists, received heavy criticism for enabling a supposedly fascist-backed takeover during a time when the Nazi party in Germany was threatening the annexation of countries across Europe. Supporters of General Franco, however, saw the resistance of the Loyalists as being spurred on by the Soviet Union, which sought to establish a communist government abroad. Since World War II, American historians have traditionally sided with the Loyalist supporters, validating their arguments that the pro-Nationalists were un-American for backing an unpalatable dictator. In Arguing Americanism, author Michael E. Chapman examines the long-overlooked pro-Nationalist argument. Employing new archival sources, Chapman documents a small yet effective network of lobbyists-including engineer turned writer John Eoghan Kelly, publisher Ellery Sedgwick, homemaker Clare Dawes, muralist Hildreth Meiere, and philanthropist Anne Morgan-who fought to promote General Franco's Nationalist Spain and keep the embargo in place. Arguing Americanism also goes beyond the embargo debate to examine the underlying issues that gripped 1930s America. Chapman posits that the Spanish embargo argument was never really about Spain but rather about the soul of Americanism, the definition of democracy, and who should do the defining. Pro-Loyalists wanted the pure democracy of the ballot box; pro-Nationalists favoured the checks and balances of indirect democracy. By pointing to what was happening in Spain, each side tried to defend its version of Americanism against the foreign forces that threatened it. For Franco supporters, it was the spread of international Marxism, toward which they felt Roosevelt and his New Deal were too sympathetic. The pro-Nationalists intensified an argument that became a precursor to a fundamental change in American national identity-a change that would usher in the Cold War era. Arguing Americanism will appeal to political scientists, cultural historians, and students of U.S. foreign relations.

In this first book-length study of the role women played in two of the most momentous revolutions of the twentieth century, Tabea Alexa Linhard provides a comparative analysis of works on the Mexican Revolution (circa 1910-1919) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Linhard was inspired by the story of the ""Trece Rosas,"" thirteen young women who, after the Spanish Civil War ended with the Nationalists' victory, were executed. One of the women, Julia Conesa, was particularly influential. In a letter she wrote to her mother a few hours before she faced the firing squad, she said, ""Do not allow my name to vanish in history."" This is Linhard's attempt to respond to Julia's last request. Although female figures such as the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution and the milicianas of the Spanish Civil War are abundant in writings about revolution and war, they are often treated as icons, myths, and symbols, displacing the women's particular and diverse experiences. Linhard maintains a focus on these women's stories, which until now - when presented at all - have usually been downplayed in literary canons, official histories, and popular memories. She addresses several existing gaps in studies of the intersections of gender, revolution, and culture in both the Mexican and the Spanish contexts. The book is grounded in transatlantic studies, an emerging field that bridges disciplinary boundaries between peninsular studies and Latin American studies. In this case, the connection between the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War is a natural consequence of the disjointed conditions out of which arose the cultural texts in which fearless women appear.

In July 1947, fresh out of college and long before he would win the Pulitzer Prize and become known as one of America's finest historians, Stanley Karnow boarded a freighter bound for France, planning to stay for the summer. He stayed for ten years, first as a student and later as a correspondent for Time magazine. By the time he left, Karnow knew Paris so intimately that his French colleagues dubbed him "le plus parisien des Américains" --the most Parisian American.

Now, Karnow returns to the France of his youth, perceptively and wittily illuminating a time and place like none other. Karnow came to France at a time when the French were striving to return to the life they had enjoyed before the devastation of World War II. Yet even during food shortages, political upheavals, and the struggle to come to terms with a world in which France was no longer the mighty power it had been, Paris remained a city of style, passion, and romance.

Paris in the Fifties transports us to Latin Quarter cafés and basement jazz clubs, to unheated apartments and glorious ballrooms. We meet such prominent political figures as Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Mendès-France, as well as Communist hacks and the demagogic tax rebel Pierre Poujade. We get to know illustrious intellectuals, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and André Malraux, and visit the glittering salons where aristocrats with exquisite manners mingled with trendy novelists, poets, critics, artists, composers, playwrights, and actors. We meet Christian Dior, who taught Karnow the secrets of haute couture, and Prince Curnonsky, France's leading gourmet, who taught the young reporter to appreciate the complexities of haute cuisine. Karnow takes us to marathon murder trials in musty courtrooms, accompanies a group of tipsy wine connoisseurs on a tour of the Beaujolais vineyards, and recalls the famous automobile race at Le Mans when a catastrophic accident killed more than eighty spectators. Back in Paris, Karnow hung out with visiting celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, and Audrey Hepburn, and in Paris in the Fifties we meet them too.

A veteran reporter and historian, Karnow has written a vivid and delightful history of a charmed decade in the greatest city in the world.

Granddaughter of Queen Victorian of England and Tsar Alexander II of Russia, Marie (1875-1938) became princess of Romania through her marriage of Ferdinand of Hohenzollem-Sigmaringen, crown prince of Romania on December 29,1892. She became Queen of Romania, her adopted country, on October 11, 1914 when Ferdinand assumed the throne following the death of King Carol I. Queen Marie became known worldwide for her charitable efforts and for her work nursing wounded soldiers on the front lines during World War I. She also took part in the political and diplomatic efforts that led to Romanian national unification in 1918. This collection of documents helps to reveal important aspects of the life and personality of this remarkable twentieth century monarch.

This Collection illustrates the Queen's relationships with two remarkable Americans and is compromised of three parts. The first selection is the diary of George Huntington, an American professor who visited Queen Marie, together with his family, in 1925. The second is a text compiled by the British writer Hector Bolitho, presenting the correspondence from Queen Marie to an American admirer, Ray Baker Harris. The third part is letters from Harris to the Queen. Harris, later a librarian at the Library of Congress compiled an extensive collection of materials relating to the Romanian Queen and donated them to the archives of Kent State University in Ohio. The materials in this volume are from the archives at Kent State University & the National Central Archives in Bucharest, Romania.

"Truly impressive. Travels uncharted terrain, moving deftly through a vast scholarship in two languages. The research is sound, the prose crisp and accessible, and the subject unquestionably important."--W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of "The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory" "Illuminates the enduring potency of memory in shaping postwar societies for generations after the fighting ceased, reminding us that both losers and victors often had powerful motives to remember--and to forget."--Caroline E. Janney, author of "Remembering the Civil War" "Traces the dynamics of memory in the aftermath of the Spanish and American civil wars and demonstrates how similar processes of closure, willful blindness, and ideological inculcation worked out in the different contexts to produce sometimes similar but often radically different outcomes." --Cillian McGrattan, author of "Memory, Politics and Identity" "With an engaging narrative and deep research, the book is a model of the benefits derived from a truly comparative study."--David Goldfield, author of "Still Fighting the Civil War" Spain and the United States both experienced extremely bloody and divisive civil wars that left social and emotional wounds, many of which still endure today. In "Uncommonly Savage," award-winning historian Paul Escott considers the impact of internecine violence on memory and ideology, politics, and process of reconciliation. He also examines debates over reparation or moral recognition, the rise of truth and reconciliation commissions, and the legal, psychological, and religious aspects of modern international law regarding amnesty.

'Barcelona is colour, noise, heat, dust, violent traffic and quick-moving people. Many of the men carry rifles slung on their backs...' Tom Wintringham (1898-1949) was a pioneer of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and commander of the British Battalion in the bloody Battle of Jarama in February 1937, at which he was wounded. English Captain is Wintringham's own startling account of his service to the cause of the Spanish republic. '[Wintringham] was a remarkable man of ideas; the foremost Marxist expert on warfare, a published poet, a brilliant propagandist... He was also a man of action who believed that few things in life could be achieved unless you were prepared to fight for them.' Hugh Purcell, History Today

During the seventy years of Soviet communism, after Lenin and Stalin no person occupied a higher position over a longer period of time than V. M. Molotov. Lenin and Stalin left no memoirs; now we have Molotov Remembers. These memoirs, in the form of conversations with the poet-biographer Felix Chuev over seventeen years before Molotov's death in 1986, offer an incomparable view of the politics of Soviet society and the nature of Kremlin leadership under communism. Beginning with his early revolutionary activities, Molotov recounts his comradeship with Lenin, the Bolshevik seizure of power, and the perilous years of Soviet rule. First at Lenin's then at Stalin's right hand, premier and then foreign minister, he offers startling insights into the New Economic Policy; the collectivization of peasant farms and the liquidation of the kulaks; the repression of "counterrevolutionaries" in the late 1930s; the making of the Nazi-Soviet pact; World War II diplomacy with the Allies; the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe; and the rise and fall of Khrushchev. His portraits of an indomitable Lenin; a crafty, brutal, and ultimately paranoiac Stalin; and a host of other Soviet leaders are indelibly drawn from firsthand experience. Molotov Remembers is not only a major publishing event but a historical source of the highest order, throwing fight on the politics and psychology of the most influential episode of the twentieth century.

Many wonder how an entire nation could allow Adolf Hitler - a mediocre army corporal and failed landscape painter - to become the architect of the most calamitous events of the twentieth century. But few know that Hitler's fateful transition from ambitious demagogue to Europe's most vicious tyrant occurred on an ordinary Saturday - June 30, 1934 - through a little-known event that would come to be called "The Night of the Long Knives."
In The Night of the Long Knives, Paul Maracin has painstakingly pieced together the scattered and intentionally obscured elements of this fascinating story of deceit, intrigue, and mass murder that has as yet received little attention from historians.
First came the burning of the Reichstag - Germany's parliament - an event that Hitler's government blamed on subversives. Hermann Goring appeared on the scene with an arrest list containing the names and addresses of every "enemy of the state," a list that Hitler and his cronies had been preparing for months.
Hitler himself arrested the principal victim at Bad Wiessee when he burst into the hotel room of Ernst Rohm, revolver in hand. Rohm was the head of the brownshirts - the Nazi's three-million-member private army - and thus one of Hitler's most dangerous rivals in the Nazi party. Soon after, Reinhard Heydrich - a chief architect of the Final Solution - and Hermann Goring began a massacre in Berlin, while Hitler sat by the phone, checking names off the list as they were killed.
This is the story of the events leading up to that awful night, and its most horrifying effects.

This book examines the relations between the Vatican and the Fascist regime in Italy, 1929-1932.

It's hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity. Tina Campt's Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of individuals, with Important distinctions from other accounts. Most strikingly, Campt centers her arguments on race, rather than anti-Semitism. She also provides an oral history as background for her study, interviewing two Black German subjects for her book. In the end the author comes face to face with an inevitable question: Is there a relationship between the history of Black Germans and those of other black communities? The answers to Campt's questions make Other Germans essential reading in the emerging study of what it means to be black and German in the context of a society that looked at anyone with non-German blood as raclally impure at best.

The age of nationalism has often been declared a bygone era. But it is by far not at its end. In the years 1990-1993, more nation states than ever before came into being within a short period of time 15 hybrid ethno-national states and three fragile states of federated nations. Since then, of the latter, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia fell apart and the other two are imperiled by ethno-national movements. State and ethnic nationalism have combined in each country in curious forms, allowing for a gradual national consciousness, which aims at multinational federalism or national autonomy as an alternative to national secession. In this volume, authors from the East and the West discuss the results of many years of research on nationalism, as well as the new approaches to the understanding of a nation. In addition, the failure of the multinational states the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, the partial national state German Democratic Republic, and presumably also Bosnia and Herzegovina are analyzed. After the breakdown of the multinational states and the polyethnic empires some decades ago, the question is raised: Will an integrated European Union succeed in finding an adequate answer to nationalism and the nationalities problem?

The twentieth-century history of few countries has been so profoundly marked by breaks, discontinuities, and ruptures as has Germany's--the radical breaks between the Wilhelmine empire, the Weimar Republic, and the National Socialist period; the "end of history" in 1945 and the dual reconstruction from "Year Zero," followed by the reunification of post-1989 German. This special issue of "South Atlantic Quarterly" focuses on the many dimensions of these discontinuities--social, political, cultural, aesthetic, psychological, and physical--as well as the continuities that are equally, if less apparently, implied by them.
The contributions presented here include Fredric Jameson's "Ramblings in Old Berlin," Gunter Grass's "Lonesome Capitalism," and Peter Weiss's "Aesthetics of Resistance." Among the topics discussed in the volume are the debate over Holocaust memorials in Germany and the significance of their connections to the German past, the problematic continuity that identifies the new unified Germany with the former Federal Republic; the dangers to women posed by the neoliberal project; the legacy of the avant-garde in today's media theory; "Ars nova" and "Doktor Faustus;" nostalgia for the old German Democratic Republic; and reflections on traumatic memory and history as trauma.
"Contributors. "Ulrich Baer, Michael Geyer, Gunter Grass, Frigga Haug, Julia Hell, Fredric Jameson, Juliet Koss, Andreas Michel, Martin Morris, Arkady Plotnitsky, Pierra Vidal-Naquet, Peter Weiss, James E. Young

For this book a distinguished team of economists and historians--R. W. Davies, Paul R. Gregory, Andrei Markevich, Mikhail Mukhin, Andrei Sokolov, and Mark Harrison--scoured formerly closed Soviet archives to discover how Stalin used rubles to make guns. Focusing on various aspects of the defense industry, a top-secret branch of the Soviet economy, the volume's contributors uncover new information on the inner workings of Stalin's dictatorship, military and economic planning, and the industrial organization of the Soviet economy. Previously unknown details about Stalin's command system come to light, as do fascinating insights into the relations between Soviet public and private interests. The authors show that defense was at the core of Stalin's system of rule; single-minded management of the defense sector helped him keep his grip on power.

In response to Soviet advances in science and engineering education, the country’s top scientists with the support of the federal government in 1956 launched an unprecedented program to reform pre-college science education in the United States. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, John Rudolph traces the origins of two of the leading projects in this movement in high school physics and biology. Rudolph describes how the scientists directing these projects drew on their wartime experiences in weapons development and defense consultation to guide their foray into the field of education and he reveals how the broader social and political conditions of the 1950s Cold War America fundamentally shaped the nature of the course materials they eventually produced.

This book, which consists of essays by leading scholars in the field of twentieth century international history, examines the wider context of one of the most bitter and bloody civil wars in European history - the Spanish Civil War. The chapters discuss all of the major debates that surround the ideological and political context of the war, including the extent to which it could be regarded as a 'dress rehearsal' for the Second World War. The book also debates the nature of civil war in the twentieth century and as such will be of interest to military and international historians as well as to historians of the history of ideas.