History of spain Books 76 results

Nick Lloyd

A revelatory journey into the Spanish Civil War's physical and visual legacies, investigating how conflict is memorialised, and obscured, today. Fifty years after Franco's death, and almost ninety since the Civil War began, the scars of violence still run deep in Spain. Nick Lloyd traces this legacy through a series of road trips. Travelling through Catalonia and Aragón, among...

Felipe Fernández-Armesto / Manuel Lucena Giraldo

"A richly researched account of the clever, industrious and deeply practical men who followed in the footsteps, often literally, of Columbus, Cortés, Pizarro, Núñez de Balboa and others."—Wall Street Journal The untold story of the engineering behind the empire, showing how imperial Spain built upon existing infrastructure and hierarchies of the Inca, Aztec, and more, to furth...

Pedro Lains / Leonor Freire Costa / Regina Grafe / Alfonso Herranz-Loncán / David Igual-Luis / Vicente Pinilla / Hermínia Vasconcelos Vilar

This is a comprehensive long-run history of economic and political change in the Iberian Peninsula. Beginning with the development of the old medieval kingdoms, it goes on to explore two countries, Portugal and Spain, which during the early modern period possessed vast empires and played an essential role in the global economic and political developments. It traces how and why ...

Luke Stegemann

The miraculous story of Madrid--how a village became a great world city For centuries Madrid was an insignificant settlement on the central Iberian plateau. Under its Muslim rulers the town was fortified and enlarged, but even after the Reconquista it remained secondary to nearby Toledo. But Madrid's fortunes dramatically shifted in the sixteenth century, becoming the centre...

Helen Crisp / Jules Stewart

This is the tale of Western Europe's oldest continuously inhabited city, a 3,000-year history of war and seafaring, culture and commerce, liberalism and resistance. Helen Crisp and Jules Stewart offer a vibrant account of Cádiz past and present, from its ancient founding myths to its reinvention as a trendy tourist destination. They illuminate Cádiz's experiences under Roman an...

Michael. Reid

An incisive account of modern Spain, from the death of Franco to the Catalan referendum and beyond "Comprehensive and engaging."--Gideon Rachman, Financial Times Spain's transition to democracy after Franco's long dictatorship was widely hailed as a success, ushering in three decades of unprecedented progress and prosperity. Yet over the past decade its political consensus has...

Wayne H. Bowen

For Charles V and Philip II, both of whom expected to continue the momentum of the Reconquista into a campaign against Islam, the theology and political successes of Martin Luther and John Calvin menaced not just the possibility of a universal empire, but the survival of the Habsburg monarchy. Moreover, the Protestant Reformation stimulated changes within Spain and other Habsbu...

Nigel Townson

A revelatory new history of Spain, from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first'Spain is different, ' proclaimed the Franco regime in the 1940s, keen to attract foreign tourists. For the most part, the world has agreed. From the end of its 'glorious empire' in 1898 to the dazzling World Cup victory in 2010, the prevailing narrative of modern Spain has emphasized the cou...

Gunnar W. Knutsen

The Spanish Inquisition has become such a byword for injustice that many forget it was also a judicial system capable of acquittal. This study of more than 67,000 trials uncovers over 2,500 formal acquittals, more than 6,600 suspended trials, and nearly 2,100 with unknown or no recorded outcome. ...

Fernando Quesada Sanz

Winner of Hislibris Award for the 'Best Historical Book', faithfully translated into English for the first time, this book details the equipment, weapons, armor, horse tack, fortifications, tactics and cultures of the units that served as the backbone of the Carthaginian army.In ancient times, the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) was home to warriors of great renown. Iber...

Charles J. Esdaile

The Spanish Civil War continues to attract attention as a brutal political and military struggle which foreshadowed the wider war across Europe that followed, and it has given rise to myths that have become commonplace since the war ended eighty years ago. Few of these myths are as potent as those associated with the International Brigades, the 45,000 volunteers from many count...

Giles Tremlett

Bestselling author Giles Tremlett traverses the rich and varied history of Spain, from prehistoric times to today, in a brief, accessible primer for visitors, curious readers and hispanophiles.'Tremlett is a fascinating socio-cultural guide, as happy to discuss Spain's World Cup win as its Moorish rule' Guardian 'Negotiates Spain's chaotic history with admirable clarity and sty...

Michael Eaude

A history of Catalonia and its struggle for independence, from the 10th century to the present day At every home game of FC Barcelona, at 17 minutes and 14 seconds of play, the 100,000-capacity Camp Nou stadium is filled by the roar of "IN-DE-PEN-DÈN-CI-A!" Time stops for a second. History lives in the present... Catalonia's national consciousness has deep roots. There are c...

Mark Simmons

"Detailed [...] readers with a deep interest in WWII will find this rewarding." -- Publishers WeeklyThis book tells the story of the various Allied operations and schemes instigated to keep Spain and Portugal out of WWII, which included the widespread bribery of high ranking Spanish officials and the duplicity of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr.Ian Fleming and Alan ...

James Falkner

The War of the Spanish Succession, fought between 1701 and 1714 to decide who should inherit the Spanish throne, was a conflict on an unprecedented scale, stretching across most of western Europe, the high seas and the Americas. Yet this major subject is not well known and is little understood. That is why the publication of James Falkner's absorbing new study is so timely and ...

Stephen Roberts

Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) is perhaps Spain's most famous writer and cultural icon. By the age of thirty, he had become the most successful member of a brilliant generation of poets, winning critical and popular acclaim by fusing traditional and avant-garde themes and techniques. He would go on to reinvent Spanish theater too, writing bold, experimental, and often shocki...

Jeremy Black

A wonderfully concise and very readable history of Spain, perfect for travellers This is the extraordinary story of Spain, from early tribalism and Roman rule to the Moorish conquest, Spain's eighteenth-century revival under the Bourbons, the Peninsular War and revolution in Spanish America right up to the catastrophic civil war and Franco's totalitarian regime. A key theme fr...

Kevin Ingram

This book examines the effects of Jewish conversions to Christianity in late medieval Spanish society. Ingram focuses on these converts and their descendants (known as conversos) not as Judaizers, but as Christian humanists, mystics and evangelists, who attempt to create a new society based on quietist religious practice, merit, and toleration. His narrative takes the reader on...

Jorge Tamames

Recent years have witnessed dramatic challenges to established politics across Europe and America. Opposition to business-as-usual has not been limited to the radical right: left populist movements with transformative agendas offer a very different - if equally radical - response to the status quo.Focusing on left populist movements in the contrasting political landscapes of Sp...

Alexander Clifford

In the English-speaking world, the Spanish Civil War is perhaps best remembered through the exploits of thousands of foreign volunteers from across the globe who joined the International Brigades - a force of communists, socialists and others who took their opposition to fascism to extraordinary lengths. Their passionate political commitment to Spain's cause and determination i...

E. R. Hooton

A military history of the Spanish Civil War from January 1937 onwards, uncovering new evidence and overturning much of the received wisdom about the conflict.Spain in Arms is a military history of the Spanish Civil War. It examines how the Spanish Civil War developed on the battlefield through the prism of eight campaigns between 1937-1939 and shows how many accounts of militar...

Francisco García Fitz / João Gouveia Monteiro

War in the Iberian Peninsula, 700-1600 is a panoramic synthesis of the Iberian Peninsula including the kingdoms of Leon and Castile, Aragon, Portugal, Navarra, al-Andalus and Granada. It offers an extensive chronology, covering the entire medieval period and extending through to the sixteenth century, allowing for a very broad perspective of Iberian history which displays the f...

Giles Tremlett

1474. Castile was the largest, strongest, and most populous kingdom in Hispania-- and Isabella ascended the throne, a female ruler in a male-dominated world. Her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon not only united their kingdoms, but began a royal partnership in which Isabella more than held her own. Tremlett chronicles Isabella's colorful life as she led her country out of the Mid...

Richard Hitchcock

From the perspective of the Hispano-Romans, the Visigoths who invaded Spain in the mid-fifth century were heretical barbarians. But Leovigild's military success and Reccared's conversion to Catholic Christianity led to more positive assessments of the Gothic role in Iberian history. John of Biclaro (c.590) and Isidore of Seville (c.625) authored histories that projected the Got...

Peter Cole

Hebrew culture experienced a renewal in medieval Spain that produced what is arguably the most powerful body of Jewish poetry written since the Bible. Fusing elements of East and West, Arabic and Hebrew, and the particular and the universal, this verse embodies an extraordinary sensuality and intense faith that transcend the limits of language, place, and time. Peter Cole's tr...

Paul Preston

UPDATED EDITIONA rousing and full-blooded account of the Spanish Civil War and the rise to prominence of General Franco. No modern conflict has inflamed the passions of both civilians and intellectuals as much as the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. Burned into our collective historical consciousness, it not only prefigured the imminent Second World War but also ushered in a new ...

Ruth Mackay

Since the early modern era, historians and observers of Spain, both within the country and beyond it, have identified a peculiarly Spanish disdain for work, especially manual labor, and have seen it as a primary explanation for that nation's alleged failure to develop like the rest of Europe. In "Lazy, Improvident People," the historian Ruth MacKay examines the origins of this ...

Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote. ...

Raymond Carr

In this up-to-date and engaging tour of Spain through the ages, one of the world's leading authorities on the history of Spain, Sir Raymond Carr, provides an authoritative overview of a country that has played a vital role in the history of the Western world. He tells of prehistoric Spain and of the imposition of Roman rule, which created the idea of Hispania as a single entit...

Simon Barton / Richard Fletcher / Rosemary Horrox / Simon Maclean

Makes available, for the first time in English translation, four of the principal narrative sources for the history of the Spanish kingdom of León-Castile during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Three chronicles focus primarily upon the activities of the kings of León-Castile as leaders of the Reconquest of Spain from the forces of Islam, and especially upon Fernando I (1037...