The Art Of War In Spain

The 1492 conquest of Granada in southern Spain is crucial to a proper understanding of the development of Western European warfare. The culmination of a long struggle between the Muslim and Christian cultures in Western Europe, it was the training ground for the armed forces that were to make Spain the dominant military power in Europe throughout the sixteenth century. It also set the stage for the discovery of the New World - it was the war that had to be won before Ferdinand and Isabella would agree to sponsor Columbus's momentous voyage. William Prescott's absorbing account of the War of Granada is now set in context by Albert D. McJoynt, who examines the role of the conquest of Granada in Spanish warfare and its influence on Western Europe. Military histories in English have tended to neglect Spain's experience in Granada, causing a critical gap in awareness of the factors that led to its military strength in Europe after the Italian Wars of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Far from merely copying their adversaries' techniques during these wars, as has often been assumed, the Spanish armed forces had already adopted most of the advances that took Spanish warfare from the medieval to early modern stage.

Sun Tzu's The Art of War is still one of the world's most influential treatises on strategic thought. Applicable everywhere from the boardroom to the bedroom, from the playing field to the battlefield, its wisdom has never been more highly regarded. Now available in its complete form, including the Chinese characters and English text, this essential examination of the art of strategic thinking features extensive commentary and an insightful historical introduction written by Lionel Giles, its original translator. This new edition includes an all-new introduction by the scholar of ancient Chinese literature, John Minford.

While the intricate relationship between history, memory and representation is of central concern in contemporary society everywhere, it is perhaps more alive in Spain than in any other European country. The seventy-fifth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War has re-ignited interest in this field – an interest that is reflected in this book and which it will reinforce. This book features cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research on the political, historical, cultural, and literary legacy of the Spanish Civil War by a mixture of new and leading scholars from Europe, North America and New Zealand.

A heart-wrenching, yet enlightening collection of children's drawings forged in the fires of war. Of the 600,000 refugees who sought shelter from Franco's tyranny in the relative security of Republican-controlled eastern Spain, more than 200,000 were children. The Republic responded to this crisis by establishing colonias infantiles (children's colonies), often in country estates and mansions that had been abandoned by fascist sympathizers. In these colonies, the young refugees -- many of them orphaned or sent by their parents to safety -- received schooling and medical care, kept each other company, and produced thousands of drawings that serve as a moving, collective testimony of the experience of being a child in wartime. Companion to a major traveling exhibition, They Still Draw Pictures collects and comments on a cross-section of the children's art produced in the colonias infantiles. Born of the trauma of exile and separation, the drawings are invaluable historical documents, giving physical form to the children's experiences of air raids, brutality, destruction, and homelessness. These pictures also represent daily life in the colonies and preserve the children's clear memories of life before the war and hope for life after it. They are supplemented by a smaller selection of drawings from later wars. "Once I drew like Rafael, " Picasso said, "but it has taken me a lifetime to draw like a child." Deceptively transparent, these drawings speak with a poignant immediacy of war's consequences for its youngest victims.

An intimate portrait of childhood during Spain's violent fascist regime, rendered in a surreal kaleidoscope of linked stories. Serge Pey's stories are lyrical, vivid vignettes of life during and directly following Spain's violent fascist regime of the thirties and forties. The collection is a defiant ode to the resilience of the human spirit, each story depicting a small act of human resistance: a man plants a fruit tree for each of his assassinated comrades; a professor hides a secret library of banned books in plain sight. Many of the stories are surreal, fable-like impressions from the perspective of children caught in the midst of the political violence. Pey's understated yet unusual prose renders a brutal landscape with childlike wonder. The Treasure of the Spanish Civil War and Other Tales is a strikingly original meditation on courage, survival, and hope in the face of oppression.