Most accounts on the Spanish transition to democracy of the late 1970s are based on a false dilemma. Its simplest formulation could be: was it the pressure from below, i.e. the organized working classes, students and neighbors associations that triggered political change; or was the elite settlement reached by the regime soft-liners and the moderate sectors of the democratic opposition that established it? This new and innovative volume appraises the movement towards a more democratic Spai...

Exploring the constitution that transformed governance, citizenship, and political culture across the Hispanic Atlantic world.In March 1812, while Napoleon’s brother Joseph sat on the throne of Spain and the armies of France occupied much of the country, legislators elected from Spain and its overseas territories met in the Andalusian city of Cádiz. There, as the cornerstone of a government in exile, they drafted and adopted the first liberal constitution ...

Religion and politics have historically clashed in modern Spain but the complexity of the controversial and sometimes violent relationships between Catholic values and modern political regimes continue to ride a precarious line of spiritual accommodation versus public policy. Leading experts on religious Spanish tradition and recent historiographic findings set out to define and interrogate grey areas in the last two centuries beyond the reductive conventional notion of an ever-warring "Tw...

Here is an intriguing exploration of the ways in which the history of the Spanish Conquest has been misread and passed down to become popular knowledge of these events. The book offers a fresh account of the activities of the best-known conquistadors and explorers, including Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro. Using a wide array of sources, historian Matthew Restall highlights seven key myths, uncovering the source of the inaccuracies and exploding the fallacies and misconceptions behind each m...

Tamar Herzog asks how territorial borders were established in the early modern period and challenges the standard view that national boundaries are settled by military conflicts and treaties. Claims and control on both sides of the Atlantic were subject to negotiation, as neighbors and outsiders carved out and defended new frontiers of possession.

“Hello, hello Brazil” was the standard greeting Brazilian radio announcers of the 1930s used to welcome their audience into an expanding cultural marketplace. New genres like samba and repackaged older ones like choro served as the currency in this marketplace, minted in the capital in Rio de Janeiro and circulated nationally by the burgeoning recording and broadcasting industries. Bryan McCann chronicles the flourishing of Brazilian popular music between the 1920s and the 1950s. ...

Boadas i Rivas was born in Barcelona in 1894 and died in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1972. Together with Medir Mart and Pere Vandellós, he was one of the leaders of the first anarcho-syndicalist action group organised in Catalonia from late 1917 onwards, before the six-year period of “pistolerismo” erupted in Barcelona. He can, therefore, be regarded as the pioneer of those Barcelona anarcho-syndicalist action groups of which so much has been said; though little is known about the indivi...

Before dawn one morning in June 1612, an elderly Frenchman took charge of a carriage carrying a precious cargo near Tyburn Fields, London's notorious place of execution. It was heading for a house in Spitalfields, where a wizened Spanish woman was waiting to receive the mortal remains of freshly-martyred Catholic priests. Her name was Luisa de Carvajal and this book tells her story. Born into a great Spanish noble family, Luisa suffered a horribly abusive childhood and from her early years...

The organization of several thousand Irish American men into a military outfit, which then attempted to invade Canada from within the United States, is a significant historical event that remains largely unexplored from an Irish and Irish American perspective. This study offers a fuller exploration of the details behind the Fenian invasion, asking why Irish immigrants were motivated to shape American international policy and examining the ways in which the Fenians defined identity as a tra...

Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 bot...

Momentous changes swept Spain in the fifteenth century. A royal marriage united Castile and Aragon, its two largest kingdoms. The last Muslim emirate on the Iberian Peninsula fell to Spanish Catholic armies. And conquests in the Americas were turning Spain into a great empire. Yet few in this period of flourishing Spanish power could define “Spain” concretely, or say with any confidence who were Spaniards and who were not. Speaking of Spain offers an analysis of the cultural and p...

BARRICADES IN BARCELONA focuses on Barcelona in 1936-1937; it provides an account of the street battles and victory of July 1936, examines the defence and neighborhood committees that defeated the uprising in the city, and addresses the arbitrary decision of the CNT-FAI superior committees to collaborate with counterrevolutionary parties and social groups to preserve anti-fascist unity at any price, and how this decision culminated, in May 1937, in the defeat of the revolution. It also foc...