The Persistence of Politics: The Impact of the Cold War on Anglo-American Writings on the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is twofold. Without claiming to be exhaustive, it seeks to identify the debates and trends in Spanish Civil War historiography in the United States and Great Britain which developed during key phases of the Cold War between 1947 and 1959. Second, it considers the extent to which the ideological preoccupations of the Cold War were transmitted to Civil War studies and thereby contributed to the ongoing politicization of the subject. Implicit in this analysis is the argument that most contemporary academics make the mistake of reading anti-communist perspectives found in writings on the Spanish Civil War as products of a monolithic Cold War mentality. To achieve a more nuanced understanding of the political dimension of the Civil War, this essay will focus on representative examples of Anglo-American writings critical of the communists which fall into distinct genres.