The Spanish Civil War
A Very Short Introduction
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Davis
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By:
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Helen Graham
About this listen
Amid the many catastrophes of the 20th century, the Spanish Civil War continues to exert a particular fascination among history buffs and the layperson alike. This Very Short Introduction integrates the political, social, and cultural history of the Spanish Civil War. It sets out the domestic and international context of the war for a general audience. In addition to tracing the course of war, the book locates the war's origins in the cumulative social and cultural anxieties provoked by a process of rapid, uneven, and accelerating modernism taking place all over Europe. This shared context is key to the continued sense of the war's importance. The book also examines the myriad of political polemics to which the war has given rise, as well as all of the latest historical debates. It assesses the impact of the war on Spain's transition to democracy and on the country's contemporary political culture.
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Beginning with May 29, 1919, when photographs of the solar eclipse confirmed the truth of Einstein's theory of relativity, Johnson goes on to describe Freudianism, the establishment of the first Marxist state, the chaos of "Old Europe", the Arcadian 20s, and the new forces in China and Japan. Also discussed are Karl Marx, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt, Gandhi, Castro, Kennedy, Nixon, the '29 crash, the Great Depression, Roosevelt's New Deal, and the massive conflict of World War II.
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The Anti-Howard Zinn
- By Pork C. Fish on 05-22-12
By: Paul Johnson
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Vietnam
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- By: Christopher Goscha
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 23 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In Vietnam, Christopher Goscha tells the full history of Vietnam, from antiquity to the present day. Generations of emperors, rebels, priests, and colonizers left complicated legacies in this remarkable country. Periods of Chinese, French, and Japanese rule reshaped and modernized Vietnam, but so too did the colonial enterprises of the Vietnamese themselves as they extended their influence southward from the Red River Delta.
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Not bad, but not great.
- By Kp on 08-06-18
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They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else
- A History of the Armenian Genocide
- By: Ronald Grigor Suny
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 15 hrs and 34 mins
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Starting in early 1915, the Ottoman Turks began deporting and killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the first major genocide of the 20th century. By the end of the First World War, the number of Armenians in what would become Turkey had been reduced by 90 percent - more than 1,000,000 people. A century later, the Armenian genocide remains controversial but relatively unknown, overshadowed by later slaughters and the chasm separating Turkish and Armenian versions of events.
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Great book, unbiased view finally
- By Raffy Afarian on 10-30-15
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The Red Flag
- A History of Communism
- By: David Priestland
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
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In The Red Flag, Oxford professor David Priestland tells the epic story of a movement that has taken root in dozens of countries across 200 years, from its birth after the French Revolution to its ideological maturity in 19th-century Germany to its rise to dominance (and subsequent fall) in the 20th century.
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Best History of Communism I Have Seen
- By David on 06-11-15
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No Simple Victory
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If history really belongs to the victor, what happens when there's more than one side declaring victory? That's the conundrum Norman Davies unravels in his groundbreaking book No Simple Victory. Far from being a revisionist history, No Simple Victory instead offers a clear-eyed reappraisal, untangling and setting right the disparate claims made by America, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union in order to get at the startling truth.
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The Best Account of WWII in Europe
- By Nikoli Gogol on 12-27-07
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The Story of Russia
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The Story of Russia is about how the Russians defined themselves―and repeatedly reinvented such definitions along the way. Moving from Russia’s agrarian beginnings in the first millennium to subsequent periods of monarchy, totalitarianism, and perestroika, all the way up to Vladimir Putin and his use of myths of Russian history to bolster his regime, celebrated historian Orlando Figes examines the ideas that have guided the country’s actions.
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Almost perfect…
- By Samantha Dispenzieri on 02-21-23
By: Orlando Figes
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The Anatomy of Fascism
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What is fascism? By focusing on the concrete, what the fascists did rather than what they said, the esteemed historian Robert O. Paxton answers this question for the first time. From the first violent uniformed bands beating up "enemies of the state", through Mussolini's rise to power, to Germany's fascist radicalization in World War II, Paxton shows clearly why fascists came to power in some countries and not others.
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Great book for getting a clearer idea of fascism
- By Amazon Customer on 11-02-17
By: Robert O. Paxton
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The Long Shadow
- The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century
- By: David Reynolds
- Narrated by: John FitzGibbon
- Length: 19 hrs and 55 mins
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One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War II. In The Long Shadow critically-acclaimed historian David Reynolds seeks to broaden our vision by assessing the impact of the Great War across the twentieth century. He shows how events in that turbulent century—particularly World War II, the Cold War, and the collapse of Communism—shaped and reshaped attitudes to 1914–18.
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The World According to David Reynolds (feat. WWI)
- By Steve on 02-26-15
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The Gates of Europe
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Ukraine is currently embroiled in a tense fight with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence. But today's conflict is only the latest in a long history of battles over Ukraine's territory and its existence as a sovereign nation. As the award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues in The Gates of Europe, we must examine Ukraine's past in order to understand its present and future.
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An extraordinarily good book
- By Specs2789 on 03-01-23
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Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War
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Burning Country explores the complicated reality of life in present-day Syria with unprecedented detail and sophistication, drawing on new first-hand testimonies from opposition fighters, exiles lost in an archipelago of refugee camps, and courageous human rights activists. Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami expertly interweave these stories with an incisive analysis of the militarization of the uprising, the rise of the Islamists and sectarian warfare, and the role of Syria’s government in exacerbating the brutalization of the conflict.
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Definitive Account of the Syrian Revolution
- By Theo Horesh on 06-07-18
By: Robin Yassin-Kassab, and others
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The Spanish Civil War was a local conflict on the margins of Europe—a short yet bloody series of battles in a lull between the great World Wars—but the conflict was a microcosm of war in the 20th century. Not only did the Spanish Civil War foreshadow the global conflagration to come, but it also had its roots in the modern era’s central divides: urban versus rural, religion versus secularization, rich versus poor, progress versus tradition, democracy versus fascism and communism.
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The Maya forged one of the greatest societies in the history of the ancient Americas and in all of human history. Long before contact with Europeans, Maya communities built spectacular cities with large, well-fed large populations. They mastered the visual arts, and developed a sophisticated writing system that recorded extraordinary knowledge in calendrics, mathematics, and astronomy. The Maya achieved all this without area-wide centralized control.
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Pretty great, but a bit superficial.
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The Roman Empire was a remarkable achievement. It had a population of 60 million people spread across lands encircling the Mediterranean and stretching from northern England to the sun-baked banks of the Euphrates, and from the Rhine to the North African coast. It was, above all else, an empire of force - employing a mixture of violence, suppression, order, and tactical use of power to develop an astonishingly uniform culture.
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I love it
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A People Betrayed
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Whereas so many 20th-century Spanish histories begin with Franco and the devastating Civil War, Paul Preston's magisterial work begins in the late 19th century with Spain's collapse as a global power, especially reflected in its humiliating defeat in 1898 at the hands of the United States and its loss of colonial territory.
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“However….”
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What listeners say about The Spanish Civil War
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Andor
- 10-28-23
Excellent short survey
Graham has done a fabulous job of pulling together the political, cultural and social history of a very complicated, heroic and tragic era in Spanish history. I highly recommend this book for anyone looking for an introduction to the topic. I’m going to
Spain on a short trip and wanted a background. This is it.
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- drspinosaurus
- 10-03-23
An unbalanced history
Franco’s Spain clearly grew out of horror. It must have been a terrible place for the Republicans, and seems an impossible anachronistic dictatorship in the mid 20th century. This book is happy to point all of this out, as its sympathies clearly lie on the left. It does a poor job of showing the brutality of the left and the Republic in all its various schisms during this time.
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- Bryce Despain
- 01-23-23
The Spanish Civil War
In short, I was required to read this for one of my Spanish Civil War course in college. At first, I didn’t really know what to expect because the book itself wasn’t very big, so I assumed it wouldn’t contain a lot of useful information. However, I was wrong! All 7 chapters of the book specifically highlight a certain part of the war, whether it was pre, during, or post wartime. Altogether, I would recommend this book for anyone who is interested in history and to who wants to learn more about the war itself!
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- Julie Pollaro
- 05-24-24
Facism won
If you enjoy European history this is a book for you. I’m old enough to know that the Nazis helped Franco become dictator and that he ruled until the mid 1970’s.
Mussolini was also involved committing 75000 troops to help Franco. This was another case of France and England being so adverse to war they ignored what was going on in their own backyard. Having read about how terrible the Great War was I understand the reluctance of entering another country’s conflict. However that fear is exactly what dictators count on. Entering into war is not always correct as we experienced in Iraq , Afghanistan and Vietnam however sometimes it is the correct course as we can see now re the Korean War.
Franco was a facist who overthrew a democratic government and ruled for 35 years. It was an oppressive and ruthless regime which we along with the Europeans allowed to continue. Those who oppose helping Ukraine should read this book. It takes a long time to correct your mistakes once democracy disappears.
The author did a great job being concise and avoiding lengthy language to explain how events happened and why. It’s also a good example of how democratic bureaucracy sometimes gets in its own way.
Really good read, short and to the point.
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- Paul
- 10-04-24
Not the Communists you’re looking for
Title says enough, but basically a very one-sided and simplistic approach. Particularly unfair to the Catholic Church. Presumes liberal-democracy productive of socialism and secularism as the exclusively, eternally, and universally valid form of polity. Agenda-driven, one-sided and bitter.
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- brendan f kelly
- 05-26-21
As exciting as a Communist Party meeting...
Despite what decades of Communist propaganda (both popular and academic) have to say, the Spanish Civil War had no “good guys”. Every atrocity performed by Franco and his Fascist supporters was equaled or exceeded by the Republicans, the Leftist Militias, and the “International Brigades” on the other side. The “White Terror” may have been ultimately more effective than the “Red Terror” that proceeded and provoked it; but both were equally brutal, equally random, and equally evil. For every Guernica there is a Paracuellos. For every Lorca there is a Maetzu. The Republicans were NOT doomed romantic idealists, they were murderous Stalinists, Trotskyites and Anarchists; and they had as much (or more) innocent blood on their hands as the Francoists and Fascists that murdered them did. This was clear at the time, but the new materials that became accessible after the fall of the USSR removed any and all doubt about the issue. To state otherwise is simply factually inaccurate.
Given the above, you learn everything you need to know about this book when the author refers to “the mass political democracy” set in motion by “the Russian Revolution”.
Anyone who can claim with a straight face that the Russian Revolution was in any way, shape, or form, “democratic’ needs to go back to wherever they attended college and demand a refund. The author going on to describe the Spanish Civil War a “Authoritarian against Liberal Political Cultures” reveals a profound ignorance of the war, (and most likely an over exposure to Hemmingway). The Popular Front Government was a creature of the Third International. It executed Catholics simply for being Catholic, relied on the NKVD to provide internal stability, desecrated churches and monasteries, banned religious services, murdered its' political opponents (real and suspected), received Soviet political and military aid, and shipped the Spanish national gold reserves to the USSR. The Republicans were many things, but “Liberal” is not one of them.
Nonetheless, this book proclaims Stalin’s minions to be liberal democrats, and then descends into the sort of dull, dry, and predictable academic condescension normally seen only in a third-rate doctoral thesis. That this white wash of the Marxist Republicans also includes a healthy dose of academically required anti-Catholicism is hardly surprising. In fact, as far as I can tell, nothing about this book is surprising, or original, or even vaguely interesting. (That goes double if you’ve ever seen a pre 1990 issue of PRAVDA.)
The narrator has a wonderful voice, and does his heroic best; but the writing here is solidly in the “look how big my vocabulary is” school. ( I’m in MENSA and even I have never witnessed “disarticulation” being used in actual conversation.) This book has all the literary style of a high school term paper, albeit with less excitement and more “buzzwords”. Given such turgid prose there is only so much the poor man can do, but he does his best and goes down fighting.
If you want to learn about the Spanish Civil War, avoid this book and get Homage To Catalonia instead. Not only is it far better written; but Orwell, HAVING ACTUALLY BEEN THERE, had firsthand knowledge about the subject on which he writing. Despite Orwell’s first hand knowledge, Ms. Graham has no reluctance in condescendingly explaining how Orwell is wrong, misunderstood what he actually saw, “overestimated’ the Communist involvement, and that Orwell simply doesn’t know as much about this as she does. If nothing else, Ms. Graham certainly has chutzpah.
This book adheres so closely to the old Marxist Party Line, (with all the inherent falsehoods and intellectual shoddiness that requires), I had to repeatedly check to see that it actually was written after the collapse of the USSR, and was not just a regurgitation of old Pravda articles.
My advice is to avoid this book at all costs. I’ve already returned my copy.
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