Description: This book presents an original new history of the most important conflict in European affairs during the 1930s, prior to the events that produced World War II - the Spanish Civil War. It describes the complex origins of the conflict, the collapse of the Spanish Republic, and the outbreak of the only mass worker revolution in the history of Western Europe. Stanley Payne explains the character of the Spanish revolution and the complex web of republican politics, while also examining in detail the development of Franco's counterrevolutionary dictatorship. Payne gives attention to the multiple meanings and interpretations of war and examines why the conflict provoked such strong reactions in its own time, and long after. The book also explains the military history of the war and its place in the history of military development, the non-intervention policy of the democracies, and the role of German, Italian, and Soviet intervention, concluding with an analysis of the place of the war in European affairs and in comparative perspective of revolutionary civil wars of the twentieth century.
Brief description: Stanley Payne has taught history at several universities, including Columbia University, University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Wisconsin. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding member of Real Academia Española de la Historia, Madrid. He has received various awards and prizes, most recently the Marshal Shulman Book Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (2005) and the Gran Cruz de Isabel la Católica from the Spanish government (2009). He has been co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary History since 1999. Professor Payne is the author of more than 20 books and 150 articles, as well as co-author or co-editor of 9 books. Most recently, he is the author of The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933-1936: Origins of the Civil War, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II, Spain: A Unique History and Civil War in Europe, 1905-1949.
Review Quotes: 'Payne, drawing on his knowledge and research on Spanish history, has written a legible (rather than just academic) history of the origins, political and military development, and consequences of the Spanish Civil War. His familiarity with twentieth-century European history enables him to place it in a comparative perspective. An important and objective work that ... will generate interesting debates.' Juan J. Linz, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political and Social Science, Yale University