As one of Europe's great industrial and revolutionary centres Barcelona has been in need of a detailed social and cultural history, yet there is actually a paucity of detailed research. This book redresses the balance. Focusing on the entire twentieth century, it allows for the emergence of long-term trends, and deals with both classic and newer themes of labour history. This novel and authoritative work will interest not only those working on Spain, but all scholars and students of comparative history.

Through the eyes of a young American female radical socialist, living and working in Barcelona during the Catalan Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, the dreams, the nightmares and the realities of European politics in the age of dictatorship are fully brought to life. An autobiographical commentary written on the eve of World War Two.

"This is not just another book: it is a major achievement."—Eric R. Wolf, author of Europe and the People Without History

Inventing the Recording focuses on the decades in which recorded sound went from a technological possibility to a commercial and cultural artefact. Through the analysis of a specific and unique national context, author Eva Moreda Rodríguez tells the stories of institutions and individuals in Spain and discusses the development of discourses and ideas in close connection with national concerns and debates, all while paying close attention to original recordings from this era. The book starts with the arrival in Spain of notices about Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877, followed by the first demonstrations of the invention (1878-1882) by scientists and showmen. These demonstrations greatly stimulated the imagination of scientists, journalists and playwrights, who spent the rest of the 1880s speculating about the phonograph and its potential to revolutionize society once it was properly developed and marketed. The book then moves on to analyse the 'traveling phonographs' and salones fonográficos of the 1890s and early 1900s, with phonographs being paraded around Spain and exhibited in group listening sessions in theatres, private homes and social spaces pertaining to different social classes. Finally, the book covers the development of an indigenous recording industry dominated by the so-called gabinetes fonográficos, small businesses that sold imported phonographs, produced their own recordings, and shaped early discourses about commercial phonography and the record as a commodity between 1896 and 1905.

This book analyzes the decay of Liberal politics in Spain as the regional version of the general crisis that engulfed most of Europe between 1916 and 1923. Romero enriches the important wider debate about this watershed period of European history when, in the face of unprecedented mass social protest and political mobilization, incumbent governing elites struggled to find a valid formula of social containment in the dawning of mass politics which also saw the spread of the radical new doctrines of Bolshevism and Fascism. Above all, this book examines Spain’s "crisis of modernization," a process marked by complex social and political realignments through which the nature of civil society was profoundly altered. It resulted in an unprecedented spiral of violence and a polarization that firstly led to an authoritarian formula of social control in 1923, and ultimately to the outbreak of civil war in 1936.