Historians at War : Cold War Influences on Anglo-American Representations of the Spanish Civil War

No event of the twentieth century aroused as much passion as the Spanish Civil War. People felt compelled to take sides, whether for the elected Republican government, or for Franco and the Nationalists who were seeking to overthrow it. It was a conflict which reverberated around the world, persuading many to travel to Spain and to take up arms for their cause.

When the war was finally over, its impact was felt in the pages of history books, as historians, too, took sides in forming judgments on the causes of the war and on its legacies. At no stage was this historical legacy of the war more bitterly contested than during the Cold War. Historians at War examines how the works of four Anglo-American 'writer-historians', who are widely accepted as contributing to the foundational analysis of the Spanish conflict, were shaped not just by the events of the past, but by the political climate of the time in which they were written. Using a plethora of primary materials, including archival documents and first-person accounts, Dr Burrowes scrutinizes the lives and works of two novelists, George Orwell and Gerald Brenan, and of two Spanish Civil War specialist historians, Burnett Bolloten and Herbert Southworth, in order to determine to what extent these writers participated in the murky cultural politics generated by the Cold War's rabid anti-communist climate, and how they presented and interpreted the roles played by the Spanish Communist Party and the USSR in Spain's Second Spanish Republic and its Civil War.