This is an account of Spain's disastrous war with the United States in 1898, in which she lost the remnants of her old empire. The book also analyzes the ensuing political and social crisis in Spain from the loss of empire, through World War I, to the military coup of 1923.

Most books on genocide consider it primarily as a twentieth-century phenomenon. In The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide, Levene argues that this approach fails to grasp its true origins. Genocide developed out of modernity and the striving for the nation-state, both essentially Western experiences. It was European expansion into all hemispheres between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries that provided the main stimulus to its pre-1914 manifestations. One critical outcome, on the cusp of modernity, was the French revolutionary destruction of the Vendée. Levene finishes this volume at the 1914 watershed with the destabilising effects of the 'rise of the West' on older Ottoman, Chinese, Russian and Austrian empires. "Very impressive" - Eric Hobsbawm

The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic is now widely recognized as the most devastating disease outbreak in recorded history. This cultural history reconstructs Spaniards' experience of the flu and traces the emergence of various competing narratives that arose in response to bacteriology's failure to explain and contain the disease's spread.

"Passionate and meticulous . . . [Ehrlich] delivers thought-provoking metaphors, unforgettable scenes and many beautifully worded phrases." —Benjamin Labatut, The New York Times Book Review One of The Telegraph's best books of the year The first major biography of the Nobel Prize–winning scientist who discovered neurons and transformed our understanding of the human mind—illustrated with his extraordinary anatomical drawings Unless you’re a neuroscientist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal is likely the most important figure in the history of biology you’ve never heard of. Along with Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur, he ranks among the most brilliant and original biologists of the nineteenth century, and his discoveries have done for our understanding of the human brain what the work of Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton did for our conception of the physical universe. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his lifelong investigation of the structure of neurons: “The mysterious butterflies of the soul,” Cajal called them, “whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.” And he produced a dazzling oeuvre of anatomical drawings, whose alien beauty grace the pages of medical textbooks and the walls of museums to this day. Benjamin Ehrlich’s The Brain in Search of Itself is the first major biography in English of this singular figure, whose scientific odyssey mirrored the rocky journey of his beloved homeland of Spain into the twentieth century. Born into relative poverty in a mountaintop hamlet, Cajal was an enterprising and unruly child whose ambitions were both nurtured and thwarted by his father, a country doctor with a flinty disposition. A portrait of a nation as well a biography, The Brain in Search of Itself follows Cajal from the hinterlands to Barcelona and Madrid, where he became an illustrious figure—resisting and ultimately transforming the rigid hierarchies and underdeveloped science that surrounded him. To momentous effect, Cajal devised a theory that was as controversial in his own time as it is universal in ours: that the nervous system is comprised of individual cells with distinctive roles, just like any other organ in the body. In one of the greatest scientific rivalries in history, he argued his case against Camillo Golgi and prevailed. In our age of neuro-imaging and investigations into the neural basis of the mind, Cajal is the artistic and scientific forefather we must get to know. The Brain in Search of Itself is at once the story of how the brain as we know it came into being and a finely wrought portrait of an individual as fantastical and complex as the subject to which he devoted his life.

How the legacy of monarchical empires shaped Britain, France, Spain, and the United States as they became liberal entities Historians view the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a turning point when imperial monarchies collapsed and modern nations emerged. Treating this pivotal moment as a bridge rather than a break, The Imperial Nation offers a sweeping examination of four of these modern powers—Great Britain, France, Spain, and the United States—and asks how, after the great revolutionary cycle in Europe and America, the history of monarchical empires shaped these new nations. Josep Fradera explores this transition, paying particular attention to the relations between imperial centers and their sovereign territories and the constant and changing distinctions placed between citizens and subjects. Fradera argues that the essential struggle that lasted from the Seven Years’ War to the twentieth century was over the governance of dispersed and varied peoples: each empire tried to ensure domination through subordinate representation or by denying any representation at all. The most common approach echoed Napoleon’s “special laws,” which allowed France to reinstate slavery in its Caribbean possessions. The Spanish and Portuguese constitutions adopted “specialness” in the 1830s; the United States used comparable guidelines to distinguish between states, territories, and Indian reservations; and the British similarly ruled their dominions and colonies. In all these empires, the mix of indigenous peoples, European-origin populations, slaves and indentured workers, immigrants, and unassimilated social groups led to unequal and hierarchical political relations. Fradera considers not only political and constitutional transformations but also their social underpinnings. Presenting a fresh perspective on the ways in which nations descended and evolved from and throughout empires, The Imperial Nation highlights the ramifications of this entangled history for the subjects who lived in its shadows.

​This book analyses the main historical turning points in the Spanish economy and the related challenges it faced. It focuses on six turning points that changed the direction of the Spanish economy, and identifies the economic, social or political origin of these watersheds. It also compares the Spanish trajectory with the international one, exploring the macroeconomic context in which these turning points happened, as well as the external and internal constraints on domestic political choices for a small country like Spain. The book focuses on how Spain faced up to each turning point, the reforms that were implemented, the differences between the Spanish response and that of other countries, the results of the policies enacted and what problems were not tackled. This is an interesting and unique perspective as most of the turning points in economic history are generally studies from the viewpoint of core countries such as the UK, US or Germany. The ultimate objective is to learn useful lessons from Spanish economic history in order to better face future turning points.

A comprehensive overview of the wars that saw the United States emerge as a world power; one that had immense implications for America, especially in Latin America and Asia. ABC-CLIO, acclaimed publisher of superior references on the United States at war, revisits a pivotal moment in America's coming-of-age with The Encyclopedia of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars: A Political, Social, and Military History. Again under the direction of renowned scholar Spencer Tucker, the encyclopedia covers the conflict between the United States and Spain with a depth and breadth no other reference works can match. The encyclopedia offers two complete volumes of alphabetically organized entries written by some of the world's foremost historians, covering everything from the course of the wars to relevant economic, social, and cultural matters in the United States, Spain, and other nations. Featuring a separate volume of primary-source documents and a wealth of images and maps, the encyclopedia portrays the day-to-day drama and lasting legacy of the war like never before, guiding readers through a seminal event in America's transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era.