Few topics in 20th century history generate as much interest as the Spanish Civil War. These letter from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade take us back to a time when 2800 Americans took up arms and confronted Hitler's Condor Legion, Mussolini's Black Shirts, and Franco's fascist calvary on the battlefields of Spain. Here are their combat experiences, the love letters they wrote under fire, friendships formed among themselves and with their Spanish comrades, and reports of Madrid and Barcelona undergoing history's first saturation bombing of civilian targets. It was the eve of World War II, and these men and women saw first-hand the danger facing the world. Iadrid 1937 captures for the first time the thoughts, words and dreams of those who fought. More than a collection of separate letters, Madrid 1937 gathers letters from many hands to tell a group story. Richly illustrated with over 50 color and black and white plates, this chronicle enables the reader to travel with the volunteers through France and Spain; visit the beseiged city of Madrid and walk the streets of Barcelona under fascist bombardment; experience the chaos of battle and the excitement of celebrations behind the lines; stand beside nurses and doctors as they struggle to save the lives of the wounded; and encounter famous writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Langston Hughes. Madrid 1937 tells a story of epic proportion, the struggle of a volunteer army who chose to risk their lives in the struggle against Fascism.

The Struggle for Madrid is a study of the battles that were waged between the armies of the Spanish Republic and the armies of General Francisco Franco for the city of Madrid. It was this struggle, beginning with the collapse of Republican arms at Toledo in September, 1936, and ending with the victory of the Madrid armies at Guadalajara in March, 1937, that determined the duration and characteristics of the rest of the conflict. It was the central episode of the Spanish War. Due to international intervention, the Spanish struggle lost its purely national character and became at once a civil war of a profoundly Spanish type, a war of independence waged by a section of the Spanish people against German, Italian, and Moroccan armies, and a clash of supra national ideologies that aroused the deepest passions of peoples far removed from the immediate Spanish interests at stake. Although the passions aroused by the war distort contemporary accounts of the fighting, the totalities of these obstacles present no insurmountable barrier to a preliminary investigation of the Madrid battles. Such a study is best undertaken while many of the principal actors in the Madrid tragedy still live. If truth has been affronted the witnesses may yet speak, and from the debate margin of error will be reduced. Robert Colodny's groundbreaking cross of military history and political ambitions helps reduce the gap between fiction and fact.

Spain's Martyred Cities studies international reactions to the Spanish Civil War between the Battle of Madrid in November 1936 and the bombing of Guernica in April 1937. Many of the iconic events of the war belong to this key period, when international perceptions of the conflict were decisively shaped. The subject is approached through French and British newspapers and pamphlets, and events are linked to both their immediate press coverage and subsequent literary and artistic representations. For contemporaries, the aerial bombardments of Madrid, Guernica and other cities formed part of a single unbroken narrative. It was only later that Guernica acquired its perceived symbolic primacy. The language of 'martyrdom' was sometimes evoked in pro-Republican writing as a means of challenging Francoist claims to the religious and moral high ground. But the ur-text was The Martyrdom of Madrid (1937), a compilation of the posthumous, censored reports of the French correspondent Louis Delapree on the bombing of Madrid. Delapree's earliest reporting (July-October 1936) was from both the Nationalist and Republican zones, and is used to provide an introductory overview of the early stages of the war; he was an eyewitness of the aerial bombardments of Madrid in November 1936; subsequently, the posthumous publication of his writings created a major stir in Paris. Delapree's powerful and emotive writing provides a platform from which to discuss issues of press censorship and journalistic practice. It is notable for its initial impact, when publication in no less than five languages enabled it to reach writers as different as Virginia Woolf and Andre Malraux. This book shows that Delapree's reports were also an important catalyst in Picasso's artistic involvement in the war, culminating in his Guernica. Published in association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies

During the Spanish Civil War, foreign military officers wrote highly elaborate reports of their experiences at the front. One was attaché Col. Stephen O. Fuqua of the U.S. Army, who had once held the rank of major general. His presence was highly unusual, for most military observers were less-experienced captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels. Fuqua’s reports contained important observations about Spanish armament and troop movements, and he managed to acquire Nationalist propaganda and information despite being situated entirely within Republican military lines. His reporting was considered so valuable that during World War II, Fuqua was tapped to be Time’s military commentator. Editor James W. Cortada brings Fuqua’s--and others’--insightful observations to light. The result is a volume of such immediacy that the reader feels transported to a time of great historical uncertainty amid the twentieth century’s great "dress rehearsal” for fascism and the conflagration of World War II.