"A book of rich detail.”--The Wall Street Journal Bestselling author of Ghosts of Spain Giles Tremlett traverses the rich and varied history of Spain, from prehistoric times to today, in a brief, accessible primer with color illustrations throughout. Spain's position on Europe's southwestern corner has exposed the country to cultural, political, and literal winds blowing from all quadrants throughout the country's ancient history. Africa lies a mere nine miles to the south, separated by the Strait of Gibraltar-a mountain range struck, Spaniards believe, by Hercules, in an immaculate and divine display of strength. The Mediterranean connects Spain to the civilizational currents of Phoenicians, Romans, Carthaginians, and Byzantines as well as the Arabic lands of the near east. Hordes from the Russian steppes were amongst the first to arrive. They would be followed by Visigoths, Arabs, and Napoleonic armies and many more invaders and immigrants. Circular winds and currents extended its borders to the American continent, allowing it to conquer and colonize much of the New World as the first ever global empire. Spain, as we know it today, was made by generations-worth of changing peoples, worshipping Christian, Jewish, and Muslim gods over time. The foundation of its story has been drawn and debated, celebrated and reproached. Whenever it has tried to deny its heterogeneity and create a “pure” national identity, the narrative has proved impossible to maintain. In España, Giles Tremlett, who has lived in and written about Spain for over thirty years, swiftly traces every stretch of Spain's history to argue that a lack of a homogenous identity is Spain's defining trait. With gorgeous color images, España is perfect for lovers of Spain and fans of international history.

From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Hispanic Monarchy was one of the largest and most diverse political communities known in history. At its apogee, it stretched from the Castilian plateau to the high peaks of the Andes; from the cosmopolitan cities of Seville, Naples, or Mexico City to Santa Fe and San Francisco; from Brussels to Buenos Aires and from Milan to Manila. During those centuries, Spain left its imprint across vast continents and distant oceans contributing in no minor way to the emergence of our globalised era. This was true not only in an economic sense-the Hispano-American silver peso transported across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the Spanish fleets was arguably the first global currency, thus facilitating the creation of a world economic system-but intellectually and artistically as well. The most extraordinary cultural exchanges took place in practically every corner of the Hispanic world, no matter how distant from the metropolis. At various times a descendant of the Aztec nobility was translating a Baroque play into Nahuatl to the delight of an Amerindian and mixed audience in the market of Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest was writing the first Western grammar of the Chinese language in Fuzhou, a Chinese city that enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Spanish Philippines; a Franciscan friar was composing a piece of polyphonic music with lyrics in Quechua to be played in a church decorated with Moorish-style ceilings in a Peruvian valley; or a multi-ethnic team of Amerindian and Spanish naturalists was describing in Latin, Spanish and local vernacular languages thousands of medicinal plants, animals and minerals previously unknown to the West. And, most probably, at the same time that one of those exchanges were happening, the members of the School of Salamanca were laying the foundations of modern international law or formulating some of the first modern theories of price, value and money, Cervantes was writing Don Quixote, Velázquez was painting Las Meninas, or Goya was exposing both the dark and bright sides of the European Enlightenment. Actually, whenever we contemplate the galleries devoted to Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo or Goya in the Prado Museum in Madrid; when we visit the National Palace in Mexico City, a mission in California, a Jesuit church in Rome or the Intramuros quarter in Manila; or when we hear Spanish being spoken in a myriad of accents in the streets of San Francisco, New Orleans or Manhattan we are experiencing some of the past and present fruits of an always vibrant and still expanding cultural community. As the reader can infer by now, this book is about how Spain and the larger Hispanic world have contributed to world history and in particular to the history of civilisation, not only at the zenith of the Hispanic Monarchy but throughout a much longer span of time.

The Spanish Civil War has gone down in history for the horrific violence that it generated. The climate of euphoria and hope that greeted the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy was utterly transformed just five years later by a cruel and destructive civil war. Here Julián Casanova, one of Spain's leading historians, offers a magisterial new account of this critical period in Spanish history. He exposes the ways in which the Republic brought into the open simmering tensions between Catholics and hardline anticlericalists, bosses and workers, Church and State, order and revolution. In 1936 these conflicts tipped over into the sacas, paseos and mass killings which are still passionately debated today. The book also explores the decisive role of the international instability of the 1930s in the duration and outcome of the conflict. Franco's victory was in the end a victory for Hitler and Mussolini and for dictatorship over democracy.

Related publisher website provides links to Spanish-language sites relevant to each chapter.

Based on a broad range of archival and published sources, including parliamentary and ministerial records, pedagogical treatises and journals, teachers' manuals, memoirs, and a sample of over 200 primary and secondary school textbooks, the study examines ideological and political conflict among groups of elites seeking to shape popular understanding of national history and identity through the schools, both public and private.

Written over a seven-year period to Charles V of Spain, Hernan Cortes's letters provide a narrative account of the conquest of Mexico from the founding of the coastal town of Veracruz until Cortes's journey to Honduras in 1525. The two introductions set the letters in context.

This reinterpretation of the history of modern Spain from the Enlightenment to the threshold of the twenty-first century explains the surprising changes that took Spain from a backward and impoverished nation, with decades of stagnation, civil disorder, and military rule, to one of the ten most developed economies in the world. The culmination of twenty years' work by the dean of economic history in Spain, founder of the Revista de Historia Económica and recipient of the Premio Rey Juan Carlos, Spain's highest honor for an academic, the book is rigorously analytical and quantitative, but eminently accessible. It reveals views and approaches little explored until now, showing how the main stages of Spanish political history have been largely determined by economic developments and by a seldom mentioned factor: human capital formation. It is comparative throughout, and concludes by applying the lessons of Spanish history to the plight of today's developing nations.

This book is the second volume of a proposed trilogy about the Spanish Civil War and some of the religious aspects of the war. Although this can stand as a self-contained work, it reintroduces the Alvart family and other characters from the first volume.