Twentieth Century Spain

A much-needed new overview of twentieth-century Spanish social and political history which sets developments within a European context.

Spain and the Great Powers in the Twentieth Centuryexamines the international context to, and influences on, Spanish history and politics from 1898 to the present day. Spanish history is necessarily international, with the significance of Spain's neutrality in the First World War and the global influences on the outcome of the Spanish Civil War. Taking the Defeat in the Spanish American war of 1898 as a starting point, the book includes surveys on: *the crisis of neutrality during the First World War *foreign policy under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera *the allies and the Spanish Civil War *Nazi Germany and Franco's Spain *Spain and the Cold War *relations with the United States This book traces the important topic of modern Spanish diplomacy up to the present day

Long neglected by European historians, the unspeakable atrocities of Franco’s Spain are finally brought to tragic light in this definitive work. Evoking such classics as Anne Applebaum’s Gulag and Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, The Spanish Holocaust sheds light on one of the darkest and most unexamined eras of modern European history. As Spain finally reclaims its historical memory, a full picture can now be drawn of the atrocities of Franco’s Spain—from torture and judicial murders to the abuse of women and children. Paul Preston provides an unforgettable account of the systematic terror carried out by Spain’s fascist government.

The history of twentieth-century Spanish nationalism is a complex one, placing a set of famously distinctive regional identities against a backdrop of religious conflict, separatist tensions, and the autocratic rule of Francisco Franco. And despite the undeniably political character of that story, cultural history can also provide essential insights into the subject. Metaphors of Spain brings together leading historians to examine Spanish nationalism through its diverse and complementary cultural artifacts, from “formal” representations such as the flag to music, bullfighting, and other more diffuse examples. Together they describe not a Spanish national “essence,” but a nationalism that is constantly evolving and accommodates multiple interpretations.

From the exhilarating impact of Isaac Albeniz at the beginning of the century to today's complex and adventurous avant-garde, this complete interpretive history introduces twentieth-century Spanish music to English-speaking readers. With graceful authority, Tomas Marco, award-winning composer, critic, and bright light of Spanish music since the 1960s, covers the entire spectrum of composers and their works: trends and movements, critical and popular reception, national institutions, influences from Europe and beyond, and the effect of such historic events as the Spanish Civil War and the death of Franco. Marco's penetrating aesthetic critiques are threaded throughout each phase of this rich account. Marco provides detailed coverage of the key figures, induding a chapter devoted entirely to Manuel de Falla--Spain's most celebrated twentieth-century composer--and a panoramic survey of recent arrivals on the contemporary music scene. Exploring the rise and fall of the zarzuela, the author highlights innovative works in this authentic Spanish genre. He analyzes the attempts to find an audience for Spanish opera; demonstrates the flowering of symphonic and chamber music at the beginning of this century; traces currents such as romanticism, impressionism, and neoclassicism; and tracks the influence of Spain's distinctive regional folk traditions. Covering musical innovation after Spain's emergence from its period of isolation, Marco notes the speed with which many composers absorbed the work of Stravinsky and Bartok, the twelve-tone system, aleatory forms, electronic techniques, and other European developments. English-speaking scholars, musicians, critics and general readers have for decades been without full information on the rich and varied work coming out of Spain in this century. This lively history fills a long-felt need and fills it superbly, with the knowledge and insights of a major figure in the musical world.

The book traces how Hildegart’s conception, life and early death can be mapped in uncanny manner onto the rise, organization and decline of the Sexual Reform movement in Spain. Conceived deliberately in 1914 as a ‘eugenic’ child (at a date when writing on eugenics was well under way in both England and Spain), Hildegart received her early education from her mother who in her turn had received her own from her father’s library, rich in works of utopian socialism. Subsequently and formally, Hildegart’s education through the 1920s coincided with a period in Spain when writing on eugenics and sex reform became particularly intense. It encompassed both law and medicine (favoured disciplines for those involved in the sex reform movement), and her teens provided a social education within the meetings and publications of the Campaña Sanitaria of Navarro Fernández in the 1920s. Hildegart’s own rise to a position of prominence in the world of eugenics and sex reform undoubtedly relates to her concentrated and impressive publishing activity from 1930 onwards, at a time when writings of others involved in sex reform equally reached heightened activity. The coming of the Second Republic in 1931 further facilitated this publishing activity, and made possible the organization of the Spanish chapter of the WLSR in Spain (the Liga Mundial Para la Reforma Sexual) in March 1932 with Gregorio Marañón as its President, and the youthful Hildegart (age 17) as its Secretary. The Liga gathered together the groupings of hygienists, eugenicists, lawyers and educational reformers who were already part of a wider international scene, and who had been promoting ideas of eugenics and sexual reform in Spain for some time, and particularly through the 1920s. Little more than a year after the Liga was founded Hildegart was killed by her mother, Aurora Rodríguez. It is hard to assert that this shocking event caused the death of the Liga. Nonetheless the movement in Spain seems not to have survived in coherent manner beyond 1933, although individual members continued to be active in various ways. More widely through Europe the WLSR lasted through the 1930s, although its continuity through other organizations until a later date is still insufficiently researched. In the background to the activity leading up to the founding of the Liga there is Hildegart’s correspondence with Havelock Ellis. She wrote to him to seek his advice on setting it up. The correspondence was far more than a simple request for advice, and it lasted until Hildegart’s death. It includes her record of the foundation meeting of the Liga with details of discussion of the ten planks of belief of the WLSR, and reveals the inbuilt power-struggles between professional factions in the organisation. Both the foundation document and the letters require careful interpretation. The foundation document reveals dissension within the Liga at the same time as it shows Hildegart’s energetic efforts to assert her own position within it. The letters themselves tell us much about Spanish sexual politics. But at the same time, and even more strikingly, they are full of Hildegart’s character: her style moves between business-like discussion, an endearing and ingenuous flirtatious manner, distress, and even paranoia. Above all the letters reveal a side of this youthful sexual reformer never documented elsewhere, and their extraordinary discursive nature encapsulates the paradoxes and conflicts in Spain at the time relating to thoughts on sexuality and reform. The correspondence with Ellis is moreover a text with a dramatic subtext, in that it allows us to glimpse in poignant and dramatic detail the personal tensions and anxieties in the life of this young woman who was to be murdered by her mother. The letters also testify to Hildegart’s strong and touching attachment to Ellis as mentor in the setting up of the Liga and, more personally, as a father-figure. The correspondence thus provides a unique window onto a movement and an individual both full of complexity and provide pointers the links between ideas and sexuality in England and the way such ideas were explored in Spain.

The role of the Spanish Right in the course of the twentieth-century has been a neglected area of academic study. The Politics of Revenge redresses this providing a succinct and disturbing account.

During the early twentieth century, a neo-humanist education reform burgeoned in Spain. Building upon the new science of child study, known as paidology, Spanish educators joined colleagues around the world in reading works by María Montessori, Édouard Claparède, Jean Piaget, John Dewey and other pioneers. Intellectuals such as Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset and contemporaries sought to contrast a degraded, positivist pedagogy with a humanistic, phenomenological understanding of the child. Education, they claimed, must adapt to the child's developing body and mind. Bringing together readings of Spanish intellectuals and New Education theorists, Anna Kathryn Kendrick argues that Spanish pedagogues drew upon, and in part secularized, 'catholic' notions of wholeness and totality. Analysing contemporaneous essays, avant-garde art, teachers' manuals, intelligence tests, and children's creative production during the period 1918-1936, she contends that new scientific and philosophical theories had not only intellectual but also practical consequences which were to shape an entire generation in Spain before the Civil War. Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain was awarded the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize by the Modern Language Association (MLA) for the best book in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures, as well as the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) First Book Award for innovative and exemplary scholarship. Anna Kathryn Kendrick is Director of Global Awards and Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature at NYU Shanghai.