From an American perspective, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade is arguably the most famous group of soldiers to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Hollywood screenwriter Alvah Bessie (who was later blacklisted as part of the Hollywood Ten) was a foot soldier with the Brigade and kept a riveting handwritten diary of his activities in four pocket notebooks. Carefully transcribed for the first time, these journals begin with his arrival in Spain in January of 1938, then depict his training, battlefield experiences, work on the battalion newspaper, and departure almost a year later. This never before published raw material formed the basis of Bessie's classic 1939 book Men in Battle, but in several ways these journals are even more vivid than that memoir. Bessie's notebooks reflect the fast pace of a soldier's life as he jots down impressions, often while under fire. He and his comrades stumble into a fascist camp and must flee for their lives. They endure the shelling and bombing from the forces commanded by General Francisco Franco. Ernest Hemingway visits to provide moral support and cigarettes. The squad must lead Spanish recruits as young as fifteen into a sea of deadly fire. Bessie learns that his best friend has been killed. Not simply a combat record, the notebooks also record songs the soldiers sang, diagrams of loyalist and fascist positions and combat formations, arguments among the men about politics and the conduct of the war, opinions of their officers, and the desire of many to go home. Alvah Bessie's Spanish Civil War Notebooks lend a fresh perspective to one of the most important conflicts of the 1930s and to a historically crucial opening chapter of World War II.

What was the relationship between President Franklin D. Roosevelt, architect of America’s rise to global power, and the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, which inspired passion and sacrifice, and shaped the road to world war? While many historians have portrayed the Spanish Civil War as one of Roosevelt’s most isolationist episodes, Dominic Tierney argues that it marked the president’s first attempt to challenge fascist aggression in Europe. Drawing on newly discovered archival documents, Tierney describes the evolution of Roosevelt’s thinking about the Spanish Civil War in relation to America’s broader geopolitical interests, as well as the fierce controversy in the United States over Spanish policy. Between 1936 and 1939, Roosevelt’s perceptions of the Spanish Civil War were transformed. Initially indifferent toward which side won, FDR became an increasingly committed supporter of the leftist government. He believed that German and Italian intervention in Spain was part of a broader program of fascist aggression, and he worried that the Spanish Civil War would inspire fascist revolutions in Latin America. In response, Roosevelt tried to send food to Spain as well as illegal covert aid to the Spanish government, and to mediate a compromise solution to the civil war. However unsuccessful these initiatives proved in the end, they represented an important stage in Roosevelt’s emerging strategy to aid democracy in Europe.

This book provides an intimate picture of international communism in the Stalin era. Focusing on Americans and Spaniards who worked or studied in Moscow and later participated in the Spanish civil war, it uncovers the personal and political ties that linked communists to one another and the Soviet Union.

Between 1936 and 1939, almost 1,700 Canadians defied their government and volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. They left behind punishing lives in Canadian relief camps, mines, and urban flophouses to confront fascism in a country few knew much about. Michael Petrou has drawn on recently declassified archival material, interviewed surviving Canadian veterans, and visited the battlefields of Spain to write the definitive account of Canadians in the Spanish Civil War. Renegades is an intimate and unflinching story of idealism and courage, duplicity and defeat.

A reference guide to the Spanish Civil War offers essays exploring various aspects of the conflict, brief biographies of major figures, and an annotated bibliography.

"The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) inspired and haunted an extraordinary number of exceptional atrists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Martha Gelhorn, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and John Dos Passos. It spurred breakthroughs in military and medical technology. New aircraft, weapons, tactics, and strategy all emerged in the intense Spanish conflict. Progress also arose from the horror: doctors and nurses who volunteered to serve with the Spanish defenders devised major advances in battlefield surgery and frontline blood tansfusion. Rhodes takes us into the battlefields, bomb shelters, and hospitals; into the studios of artists; and into the hearts and minds of a rich cast of characters, showing how the ideological, aesthetic, and technological developments that emerged in Spain changed the world forever." --

** Shortlisted for the Military History Matters Book of the Year Award ** 'Magnificent. Narrative history at its vivid and compelling best' Fergal Keane The first major history of the International Brigades: a tale of blood, ideals and tragedy in the fight against fascism. The Spanish Civil War was the first armed battle in the fight against fascism, and a rallying cry for a generation. Over 35,000 volunteers from sixty-one countries around the world came to defend democracy against the troops of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. Ill-equipped and disorderly, yet fuelled by a shared sense of purpose and potential glory, these disparate groups of idealistic young men and women formed a volunteer army of a size and type unseen since the Crusades, known as the International Brigades. Were they heroes or fools? Saints or bloodthirsty adventurers? And what exactly did they achieve? In this magisterial history, Giles Tremlett tells – for the first time – the story of the Spanish Civil War through the experiences of this remarkable group. Drawing on the Brigades' archives in Moscow, as well as first-hand accounts, The International Brigades captures all the human drama of a historic mission to halt fascist expansion in Europe.

In the summer of 1936, Generalissimo Francisco Franco led a group of right-wing nationalists in a military attack on the Republican government of Spain&—the start of what would become the Spanish Civil War. Despite U.S. laws banning participation in foreign conflicts, American volunteers began pouring into Barcelona in January 1937. The most famous of these anti-Franco groups was the band of 2,800 American fighters who called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. In Comrades and Commissars, Cecil D. Eby pushes beyond the bias that has dominated study of the Lincoln Battalion and gets to the very heart of the American experience in Spain. Controversy has plagued the Lincoln Battalion from the very start. Were these men selfless defenders of liberty or un-American Communists? Eby has long been regarded as one of the few balanced interpreters of their history. His 1969 book, Between the Bullet and the Lie, won accolades for its rigorous and fair treatment of the Battalion. Comrades and Commissars builds upon that earlier study, incorporating a wealth of information collected over intervening decades. New oral histories, previously untranslated memoirs, and newly declassified official documents all lend even greater authority and perspective to Eby&’s account. Most significant is Eby&’s use of Lincoln Battalion archives sequestered in a Moscow storeroom for sixty years. These papers draw renewed focus on some of the most provocative questions surrounding the Battalion, including the extent to which Americans were persecuted&—and even executed&—by the brigade commissariat. The Americans who served in the Lincoln Battalion were neither mythic figures nor political abstractions. Poorly trained and equipped, they committed themselves to back-to-the-wall defense of the doomed Spanish Republic. In Comrades and Commissars, we at last have the authoritative account of their experiences.

Packed with dramatic photos, posters, and maps, this compelling book captures the fascinating story of photojournalism in modern times.

It was the stuff of Capa, Hemingway, Orwell, Picasso, Rodoreda, Sender, and a host of others working in Catalan, German, Irish and Spanish from both sides of the Atlantic. It is also very difficult to teach, not only because the Spanish Civil War is perceived as the precursor to World War II but also because it has been heavily romanticized. This collection of articles and resources cuts to the events and their real impact on history, literature and the arts and includes commentary on contexts, rhetoric, ideology, writing, film, music, iconography and the visual, memory and displacement. This stands alone as a series of accounts of the ways the war was and is represented, giving narratives of such elements as the memories of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the uses of allegory, but it is also particularly valuable through its lists of resources and course syllabi.