"Unless he is extraordinarily cunning," writes the author, "a foreigner can barely resist landing in Spain on vacation." To the casual observer, Spain is a field that is barely recognizable as Italy a few decades ago; however, as the number of tourists increases, so do the attractive features of the people, which gradually fade away; thus, the chapters that retain the true appearance of Spain today have the added value of possible future references. The final page is devoted to the 'Traveler's Guide,' which is beneficial in presenting information not available in standard guidebooks and compressing it in a highly compact style. George Parsons Lathrop was a poet, writer, and newspaper editor from the United States.

In the decades following the American Civil War and leading up to the First World War, a definitive shift in power took place between Spain and the United States. This original book explores American artists’ perceptions of Spain during this period of turmoil and demonstrates how their responses to Spanish art helped to answer emerging, complex questions about American national identity. M. Elizabeth Boone focuses on works by Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, Robert Henri, and other American artists who traveled to Spain to study the achievements of such great masters as Murillo, Velázquez, and Goya. The resulting American paintings, some well known and others now largely forgotten, provide intriguing insights not only into the 19th-century American struggle to define itself as an imperial power but also into the relations between the United States and the Spanish-speaking world today.

As the lead singer of the Grammy Award–winning rock band Quetzal and a scholar of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, Martha Gonzalez is uniquely positioned to articulate the ways in which creative expression can serve the dual roles of political commentary and community building. Drawing on postcolonial, Chicana, black feminist, and performance theories, Chican@ Artivistas explores the visual, musical, and performance art produced in East Los Angeles since the inception of NAFTA and the subsequent anti-immigration rhetoric of the 1990s. Showcasing the social impact made by key artist-activists on their communities and on the mainstream art world and music industry, Gonzalez charts the evolution of a now-canonical body of work that took its inspiration from the Zapatista movement, particularly its masked indigenous participants, and that responded to efforts to impose systems of labor exploitation and social subjugation. Incorporating Gonzalez’s memories of the Mexican nationalist music of her childhood and her band’s journey to Chiapas, the book captures the mobilizing music, poetry, dance, and art that emerged in pre-gentrification corners of downtown Los Angeles and that went on to inspire flourishing networks of bold, innovative artivistas.

The Spanish Craze is the compelling story of the centuries-long U.S. fascination with the history, literature, art, culture, and architecture of Spain. Richard L. Kagan offers a stunningly revisionist understanding of the origins of hispanidad in America, tracing its origins from the early republic to the New Deal. As Spanish power and influence waned in the Atlantic World by the eighteenth century, her rivals created the "Black Legend," which promoted an image of Spain as a dead and lost civilization rife with innate cruelty and cultural and religious backwardness. The Black Legend and its ambivalences influenced Americans throughout the nineteenth century, reaching a high pitch in the Spanish-American War of 1898. However, the Black Legend retreated soon thereafter, and Spanish culture and heritage became attractive to Americans for its perceived authenticity and antimodernism. Although the Spanish craze infected regions where the Spanish New World presence was most felt--California, the American Southwest, Texas, and Florida--there were also early, quite serious flare-ups of the craze in Chicago, New York, and New England. Kagan revisits early interest in Hispanism among elites such as the Boston book dealer Obadiah Rich, a specialist in the early history of the Americas, and the writers Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He also considers later enthusiasts such as Angeleno Charles Lummis and the many writers, artists, and architects of the modern Spanish Colonial Revival in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spain's political and cultural elites understood that the promotion of Spanish culture in the United States and the Western Hemisphere in general would help overcome imperial defeats while uniting Spaniards and those of Spanish descent into a singular raza whose shared characteristics and interests transcended national boundaries. With elegant prose and verve, The Spanish Craze spans centuries and provides a captivating glimpse into distinct facets of Hispanism in monuments, buildings, and private homes; the visual, performing, and cinematic arts; and the literature, travel journals, and letters of its enthusiasts in the United States.