The Spanish Civil Wars

The tragedy that devastated Spain for 33 months from July 1936 to April 1939, was, first and foremost, a brutal fratricidal conflict, the product of the fatal clash between diametrically opposed views of Spain and an attempt to settle crucial issues which had divided Spaniards for generations: agrarian reform, recognition of the identity of the historical regions (Catalonia, the Basque Country), and the roles of the Catholic Church and the armed forces in a modern state. Being a war between Spaniards, it was particularly brutal, but it was also part of the broader move toward war in Europe and thus sucked in many “volunteers” from abroad. And it left a deep imprint since General Francisco Franco remained at the helm of the country until his death in 1975. The Historical Dictionary of the Spanish Civil war covers the history of the war, first through a long chronology, which highlights the major steps from the incubation to the conclusion. The overall situation is summed up in the introduction. Then the dictionary section fleshes it out, with over 600 entries on persons, places, events, institutions, battles, and campaigns. More reading can be found in an extensive bibliography. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Spanish Civil War.

"Helen Graham highlights the domestic and international context of the Spanish Civil War, and reveals its origins in the political and cultural anxieties provoked by the rapid modernization of Europe. Using personal narratives, she combines a powerfully human account of the war an its aftermath with a disturbing ethical enquiry into its legacy for the 21st century."--BOOK JACKET.

The Spanish Civil War has gone down in history for the horrific violence that it generated. The climate of euphoria and hope that greeted the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy was utterly transformed just five years later by a cruel and destructive civil war. Here Julián Casanova, one of Spain's leading historians, offers a magisterial new account of this critical period in Spanish history. He exposes the ways in which the Republic brought into the open simmering tensions between Catholics and hardline anticlericalists, bosses and workers, Church and State, order and revolution. In 1936 these conflicts tipped over into the sacas, paseos and mass killings which are still passionately debated today. The book also explores the decisive role of the international instability of the 1930s in the duration and outcome of the conflict. Franco's victory was in the end a victory for Hitler and Mussolini and for dictatorship over democracy.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. A sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, told through a dozen characters, including Hemingway and George Orwell: A tale of idealism, heartbreaking suffering, and a noble cause that failed. For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa’s photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war: a fiery nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman who went to wartime Spain on her honeymoon, a Swarthmore College senior who was the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid, a pair of fiercely partisan, rivalrous New York Times reporters who covered the war from opposites sides, and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies who sold Franco almost all his oil — at reduced prices, and on credit. It was in many ways the opening battle of World War II, and we still have much to learn from it. Spain in Our Hearts is Adam Hochschild at his very best. “With all due respect to Orwell, Spain in Our Hearts should supplant Homage to Catalonia as the best introduction to the conflict written in English. A humane and moving book."—New Republic “Excellent and involving . . . What makes [Hochschild’s] book so intimate and moving is its human scale.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times

In July 1936 insurgent Spanish troops organized a military coup to oust the elected Republican government in Madrid. The rebel generals expected to force a quick, clean regime change but they failed. The botched uprising turned into a bloody civil war. Hundreds of thousands died in a bitter conflict which tore the country apart and rapidly turned into the prelude for an even greater conflict yet to come--the Second World War. The siege of Madrid was the key battle of the war. The world watched and waited for the city to surrender as General Franco's Nationalist army, backed by Hitler and Mussolini, closed in on the Spanish capital. But Madrid did not fall. Madrileños fought tooth and nail to defend their city. Helped by volunteers from fifty other countries--the International Brigades--they held out against all the odds until the end of the conflict in 1939. Despite its central role in twentieth-century history, the siege of Madrid is an episode largely hidden from today's visitor. There is no guide to the war sites and few clues for the inquisitive traveller who wants to know more. Frontline Madrid fills that gap. This unique guide book explains what life was like in the city under siege and what happened in the battlefield dramas. The simple to follow maps and diagrams make it easy to visit the frontline sites. The vividly written descriptions bring events and people compellingly to life. The role of prominent individuals, British and American--Orwell, Hemingway, John Cornford is explored. Off the beaten track, from the University district in the city centre to the mountains of Guadarrama less than an hour away, the remains of the war in Madrid can still be found--gun emplacements, bunkers, trenches and occasional debris. Frontline Madrid retraces the footsteps of those who lived through the conflict to take the reader on a tour in time. The usual tourist traps are left far behind to enter the gripping world of a war which shaped modern European history.

On July 17, 1936, Spain suddenly breaks onto the world scene when a group of generals rebels against the legitimate Republican government. The youngest, Francisco Franco, stands out among them. It might have been just another of the many military uprisings characterizing Spanish history, but this time the rebels receive the immediate support of Hitler and Mussolini. The world takes sides: Stalin and the Communist International line up alongside the Popular Front government, which is only lukewarmly supported by France and England. What was just a failed coup thus leads to a long war, in which thousands of volunteers fight and die. The world interprets the war as a struggle between fascism, communism and democracy. But the war is first of all a civil war, in which the two faces of Spain confront each other: on one hand the rural, nationalist, Catholic country, and on the other, the metropolitan, secular, Republican one. The terrible fighting — as in every civil war — lowers the level of civilization on both sides. For three long years, Spain offers a scene that prefigures the future horrors of World War II, before the country finally sinks into dictatorship.

This is a long-awaited translation of a definitive account of the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War. Michael Alpert examines the origins, formation and performance of the Republican Army and sets the Spanish Civil War in its broader military context. He explores the conflicts between communists and Spanish anarchists about how the war should be fought, as well as the experience of individual conscripts, problems of food, clothing and arms, and the role of women in the new army. The book contains extensive discussion of international aspects, particularly the role of the International Brigades and of the Soviet Russian advisers. Finally, it discusses the final uprising of professional Republican officers against the Government and the almost unconditional surrender to Franco. Professor Alpert also provides detailed statistics for the military forces available to Franco and to the Republic, and biographies of the key figures on both sides.

What was the relationship between President Franklin D. Roosevelt, architect of America’s rise to global power, and the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, which inspired passion and sacrifice, and shaped the road to world war? While many historians have portrayed the Spanish Civil War as one of Roosevelt’s most isolationist episodes, Dominic Tierney argues that it marked the president’s first attempt to challenge fascist aggression in Europe. Drawing on newly discovered archival documents, Tierney describes the evolution of Roosevelt’s thinking about the Spanish Civil War in relation to America’s broader geopolitical interests, as well as the fierce controversy in the United States over Spanish policy. Between 1936 and 1939, Roosevelt’s perceptions of the Spanish Civil War were transformed. Initially indifferent toward which side won, FDR became an increasingly committed supporter of the leftist government. He believed that German and Italian intervention in Spain was part of a broader program of fascist aggression, and he worried that the Spanish Civil War would inspire fascist revolutions in Latin America. In response, Roosevelt tried to send food to Spain as well as illegal covert aid to the Spanish government, and to mediate a compromise solution to the civil war. However unsuccessful these initiatives proved in the end, they represented an important stage in Roosevelt’s emerging strategy to aid democracy in Europe.

The Spanish Civil War was one of the most passionate idealogical conflicts of modern times. It was the greatest and last struggle between traditional Catholicism and liberal secularism. To many, religion became the most divisive issue of the war, the single problem that distinguished one fraction from another. The Spanish Civil War as a Religious Tragedy is the first full-length comprehensive study of the religious dimension of the Spanish conflict. Drawing on memoirs, eye-witness accounts, the religious press of the period, and a thorough reading of secondary literature, José M. Sánchez objectively examines the events, issues, attitudes, and effects of the war and corrects the mythology that has grown up around the topic. Especially vivid is Sánchez's account of the anticlerical fury in which nearly 7,000 clerics were killed, thousands of churches burned and destroyed, countless lay-persons assassinated, and the entire cultural ethic of Spanish Catholicism set upon an iconoclastic bloodletting worse than any other in the history of Christianity. The clergy's offering of pastoral and idealogical support to Franco's Nationalists as a response to the fury is also examined. Sánchez then focuses on the complexities of the Basques - an intensely Catholic people who made common cause with the anticlerical Republicans. He explores the Vatican's policy toward both sides, and analyzes the theological and moral controversy over the justice of the war as fought in the journals and the press, both in Spain and abroad. Finally, he investigates the controversies as they affected Catholics in France, England, and the United States, and concludes with an evaluation of the war's impact upon the religious consciousness of Spain, the Church, and the western world.