"The Spanish Civil War was fought from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939 between the Republicans, who were loyal to the established Spanish Republic, and the Nationalists, a rebel group led by General Francisco Franco. The Nationalists prevailed, and Franco ruled Spain for the next 36 years, from 1939 until his death in 1975."--Wikipedia.

Together with his brother Humberto, Daniel Ortega Saavedra masterminded the only victorious Latin American revolution since Fidel Castro's in Cuba. Following the triumphant 1979 Nicaraguan revolution, Ortega was named coordinator of the governing junta, and then in 1984 was elected president by a landslide in the country's first free presidential election. The future was full of promise. Yet the United States was soon training, equipping, and financing a counterrevolutionary force inside Nicaragua while sabotaging its crippled economy. The result was a decade-long civil war. By 1990, Nicaraguans dutifully voted Ortega out and the preferred candidate of the United States in. And Nicaraguans grew poorer and sicker. Then, in 2006, Daniel Ortega was reelected president. He was still defiantly left-wing and deeply committed to reclaiming the lost promise of the Revolution. Only time will tell if he succeeds, but he has positioned himself as an ally of Castro and Hugo Ch&ávez, while life for many Nicaraguans is finally improving. Unfinished Revolution is the first full-length biography of Daniel Ortega in any language. Drawing from a wealth of untapped sources, it tells the story of Nicaragua's continuing struggle for liberation through the prism of the Revolution's most emblematic yet enigmatic hero.

The story of the Spanish revolution of the 1930s is quite well known to most people on the left, but there is a surprising level of ignorance concerning the events that occurred subsequently. History did not cease with the victory of Franco in 1939. And the story of how the Franco dictatorship was eventually brought down by the revolutionary movement of the Spanish workers is an inspiring one. Under the most difficult and dangerous conditions, Spanish workers launched a strike wave, which, in its intensity and duration, has no parallel anywhere. There was nothing remotely like this in Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy or Salazar’s Portugal. This was a genuine revolution, which could and should have gone far further than it did. If it did not finally succeed, that was no fault of the working class. The Spanish revolution of the 1970s was shamefully betrayed by the leaders of the communist and socialist parties, who entered into an agreement with former fascists in order halt the movement in its tracks. Alan Woods participated personally in the last phase of this struggle and was a witness to some of its most decisive moments. Using a wealth of documentary material from the time and also new interviews with key participants in the events, he tears away the thick veil of lies, myths and half-truths to reveal what actually occurred. With new struggles and challenges on the order of the day in Spain and the rest of the world, it is the duty of all conscious workers and revolutionary youth to study the lessons of the past as a necessary precondition for victory in the future. This book is an important contribution to a necessary learning process and is obligatory reading for anyone who is interested in the struggle for socialism today.

Compares the post-Second World War histories of the American and British gay and lesbian movements.

First published in France in 1961 as La Revolution et la guerre d'Espagne,this book explains the major issues of the Spanish Civil War in a remarkably clear and comprehensive fashion. The authors focus on the internal affairs of the Republic and the Anarchist collective experiments in particular. For further description, the book is best served by its critics: "The Broue-Temime work is the best general interpretation available concerning both the revolution of 1936 and the war. It is especially valuable for analysis of the CNT, the POUM, and the anarchists in both the industrial and rural areas of Catalonia. It contains rich chapters on the first days of the war in the large cities and on the May, 1937, struggle in the streets of Barcelona." —Gabriel Jackson, Hispanic American Historical Review "This, by contrast (with the work of Hugh Thomas), is what gives weight to the fine works of Pierre Broue: the effort by which he constructs a Spanish war where events, parties, and man, the motives that guided them, the difficulties they encountered, their feelings, debates, ideas, and sacrifices are arranged and told in order to make them comprehensible." —Jean-Pierre Peter, Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations "Broue has prepared the first half [of the book], dealing with the Spanish background, the revolution, and the first year of the war... [He] gives a particularly good treatment of the origins of the Spanish Communist party. "In the second half of this composite work, Temime has presented a clear, concise, and perceptive account of the military events in the last two years of the war and of the construction of Franco's authoritarian state." —Stanley G. Payne, Journal of Modern History

Felix Morrow's book, written in the white heat of the struggle, remains a Marxist classic on the Spanish Civil war. It is one of the clearest accounts produced of the movement of the Spanish masses, describing the events in Catalonia and the role of all those involved. This book contains the text of Revolution and counter-revolution together with the earlier Civil war in Spain and Ted Grant's 1973 article which provides an overview of the Spanish revolution. This book provides an excellent companion to the writings of Leon Trotsky on this question and deserves to be studied by all class-conscious activists.

Since its publication twenty-five years ago, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men has been recognized as a classic, an indispensable contribution to our understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. A key work in establishing political ideology as a major concern of modern American historians, it remains the only full-scale evaluation of the ideas of the early Republican party. Now with a new introduction, Eric Foner puts his argument into the context of contemporary scholarship, reassessing the concept of free labor in the light of the last twenty-five years of writing on such issues as work, gender, economic change, and political thought. A significant reevaluation of the causes of the Civil War, Foner's study looks beyond the North's opposition to slavery and its emphasis upon preserving the Union to determine the broader grounds of its willingness to undertake a war against the South in 1861. Its search is for those social concepts the North accepted as vital to its way of life, finding these concepts most clearly expressed in the ideology of the growing Republican party in the decade before the war's start. Through a careful analysis of the attitudes of leading factions in the party's formation (northern Whigs, former Democrats, and political abolitionists) Foner is able to show what each contributed to Republican ideology. He also shows how northern ideas of human rights--in particular a man's right to work where and how he wanted, and to accumulate property in his own name--and the goals of American society were implicit in that ideology. This was the ideology that permeated the North in the period directly before the Civil War, led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, and led, almost immediately, to the Civil War itself. At the heart of the controversy over the extension of slavery, he argues, is the issue of whether the northern or southern form of society would take root in the West, whose development would determine the nation's destiny. In his new introductory essay, Foner presents a greatly altered view of the subject. Only entrepreneurs and farmers were actually "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period. Actually, by the time the Civil War was initiated, half the workers in the North were wage-earners, not independent workers. And this did not account for women and blacks, who had little freedom in choosing what work they did. He goes onto show that even after the Civil War these guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, and especially not for blacks. Demonstrating the profoundly successful fusion of value and interest within Republican ideology prior to the Civil War, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men remains a classic of modern American historical writing. Eloquent and influential, it shows how this ideology provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.

Covering a period of five hundred years, from the arrival of the Ottomans to the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, James McDougall presents an expansive new account of the modern history of Africa's largest country. Drawing on substantial new scholarship and over a decade of research, McDougall places Algerian society at the centre of the story, tracing the continuities and the resilience of Algeria's people and their cultures through the dramatic changes and crises that have marked the country. Whether examining the emergence of the Ottoman viceroyalty in the early modern Mediterranean, the 130 years of French colonial rule and the revolutionary war of independence, the Third World nation-building of the 1960s and 1970s, or the terrible violence of the 1990s, this book will appeal to a wide variety of readers in African and Middle Eastern history and politics, as well as those concerned with the wider affairs of the Mediterranean.

The Unfinished Revolution is a superb new biography of Sun Yat-sen, whose life, like the confusion of his time, is not easy to interpret. His political career was marked mostly by setbacks, yet he became a cult figure in China after his death. Today he is the only 20th-century Chinese leader to be widely revered on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. In contrast, many Western historians see little in his ideas or deeds to warrant such high esteem. This book presents the most balanced account of Sun to date, one that situates him within the historical events and intellectual climate of his time. Born in the shadow of the Opium War, the young Sun saw China repeatedly humiliated in clashes with foreign powers, resulting in the loss of territory and sovereignty. When his efforts to petition the decrepit Manchu court to institute reforms failed, Sun took to revolution. Sun traversed the globe to canvass support for his cause. A notable feature of the book is its coverage of the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and their contributions to his uprisings on the mainland, which set the stage for the overthrow of two millennia of imperial rule in 1911. But Sun’s vision of China was not to be. Within a few years the republic was hijacked and plunged into chaos. This fascinating and immensely readable work illuminates the man and his achievements, his strengths and his weaknesses, revealing how he came to spearhead the revolution that would transform his country and yet, at his death in 1925 and still today, remain agonizingly unfinished.