España en guerra

"Spain at war" gives us a new and original approach to the Spanish Civil War and its consequences in the postwar period, when the rest of Europe was bleeding in turn. Despite the continuous barrage of books on the most important and devastating conflict that Spain suffered in the 20th century, historians who have studied it have not paid the necessary attention to the interaction between the military and ideological aspects of the conflict with society and the culture, as well as their role in social mobilization during the war. How the military mobilization affected society. This new study corrects this omission by analyzing individual experiences of ordinary citizens, who are those who make and suffer wars. It does not focus so much on the well-known characters who led the war effort on their respective sides, but on the role and repercussions of the decisions of simple soldiers, middle managers, women, children..., both at the front and at the rear. Coordinated by James Matthews, a cast of the most prestigious historians of the Civil War, both Spanish and foreign Hispanists, address in "Spain at War" issues such as the organization of the different militias that made up each side and the motivations of its members, as well as the not always easy relationships between them; recruitment systems; the impact of Muslim troops and their relationship with the peninsular population; espionage and its ways of operating; desertions; social assistance, carried out mainly by women; the economic situation and monetary policies, how the war affected children, what was eaten every day... Topics that establish a dialogue between the social and the military, which provide a more complex and nuanced understanding, a new vision and interpretation of the intense period that Spain lived between 1936 and 1944.