A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, Paul Preston

Paul Preston

No war in modern times has inflamed the passions of both ordinary people and intellectuals in the way the conflict in Spain in 1936 did.  The Spanish Civil War in burned into the European consciousness, not simply because it prefigured the much larger war that followed it, but because the intense manner of its prosecution was a harbinger of a new and horrific form of warfare that was universally dreaded.  At the same time the hopes awakened by the attempted social revolution in the republican Spain chimed with the aspiration of many in Europe and the United States during the grim years of the Depression.

I read this book to get a deeper understanding of the tensions in Spain that persist to this day as I planned a second trip to Catalonia for a horse trekking trip.  Shortly after reading this history I picked up Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls again and I was able to make a deeper connection to the characters in this classic novel with a greater understanding of the context that the story takes place in.