The Spanish Civil War : reaction, revolution and revenge /
Paul Preston.
- Revised and expanded.
- New York ; London : W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.
- xviii, 381 p., [24] p. of plates : ill. b&w ; 21 cm.
Revised and expanded edition of "A Concise history of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39," in 1996.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Acknowledgements -- List of Plates -- Map of Spain -- Preface -- Introduction: The Civil War Seventy Years On -- Ch. 1. A Divided Society: Spain Before 1931 -- Ch. 2. The Leftist Challenge, 1931-1933 -- Ch. 3. Confrontation and Conspiracy, 1934-1936 -- Ch. 4. 'The Map of Spain Bleeds': From Coup d'état to Civil War -- Ch. 5. 'Behind the Gentleman's Agreement':The Great Powers Betray Spain -- Ch. 6. 'Madrid is the Heart': The Central Epic -- Ch. 7. Politics Behind the Lines: Reaction and Terror in the City of God -- Ch. 8. Politics Behind the Lines: Revolution and Terror in the City of the Devil -- Ch. 9. Defeat by Instalments -- Ch. 10. Franco's Peace -- Epilogue -- Principal Characters -- Glossary -- List of Abbreviations -- Biographical Essay -- Index.
The definitive work on the Spanish Civil War, a classic of modern historical scholarship and a masterful narrative. Paul Preston is the world's foremost historian of Spain. This surging history recounts the struggles of the 1936 war in which more than 3,000 Americans took up arms. Tracking the emergence of Francisco Franco's brutal (and, ultimately, extraordinarily durable) fascist dictatorship, Preston assesses the ways in which the Spanish Civil War presaged the Second World War that ensued so rapidly after it. The attempted social revolution in Spain awakened progressive hopes during the Depression, but the conflict quickly escalated into a new and horrific form of warfare. As Preston shows, the unprecedented levels of brutality were burned into the American consciousness as never before by the revolutionary war reporting of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Herbert Matthews, Vincent Sheean, Louis Fischer, and many others. Completely revised, including previously unseen material on Franco's treatment of women in wartime prisons, The Spanish Civil War is a classic work on this pivotal epoch in the twentieth century.