Although the battlefields of World War II lay thousands of miles from Mexican shores, the conflict had a significant influence on the country’s political development. Though the war years in Mexico have attracted less attention than other periods, this book shows how the crisis atmosphere of the early 1940s played an important part in the consolidation of the post-revolutionary regime.Through its management of Mexico’s role in the war, including the sensitive question of military p...

Though it has been home for centuries to indigenous peoples who have mastered its conditions, the Arctic has historically proven to be a difficult region for governments to administer. Extreme temperatures, vast distances, and widely dispersed patterns of settlement have made it impossible for bureaucracies based in far-off capitals to erect and maintain the kind of infrastructure and institutions that they have built elsewhere. As climate change transforms the polar regions, this book see...

A New York Times Notable Book of the year.Acclaimed around the world and a national best-seller, this is the definitive work on Che Guevara, the dashing rebel whose epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution.Jon Lee Anderson’s biography traces Che’s extraordinary life, from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the h...

Selected as the Sunday Times History Book of the Year for 2012, this is a meticulous work of scholarship from the foremost historian of 20th-century Spain.The culmination of more than a decade of research, ‘The Spanish Holocaust’ seeks to reflect the intense horrors visited upon Spain during its ferocious civil war, the consequences of which still reverberate bitterly today.The brutal, murderous persecution of Spaniards between 1936 and 1945 is a truth that should have been...

This biography recounting the Argentinean president's rise, fall, and remarkable return to power is "a formidable achievement" ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review).Latin America has produced no more remarkable or enduring political figure than Juan Perón. Born to modest circumstances in 1895 and trained in the military, he rose to power during a period of political uncertainty in Argentina. A shrewd opportunist who understood the needs and aspirations of the c...

This essential volume recalls the activities of Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919), a leading figure in the Mexican Revolution; he formed and commanded an important revolutionary force during this conflict. Womack focuses attention on Zapata's activities and his home state of Morelos during the Revolution. Zapata quickly rose from his position as a peasant leader in a village seeking agrarian reform. Zapata's dedication to the cause of land rights made him a hero to the people. Womack describes t...

Long neglected by European historians, the unspeakable atrocities of Franco’s Spain are finally brought to tragic light in this definitive work.Evoking such classics as Anne Applebaum’s Gulag and Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, The Spanish Holocaust sheds light on one of the darkest and most unexamined eras of modern European history. As Spain finally reclaims its historical memory, a full picture can now be drawn of the atrocities of Franco’s Spain—from tortu...

By the time he was killed in the jungles of Bolivia, where his body was displayed like a deposed Christ, Ernesto "Che" Guevara had become a synonym for revolution everywhere from Cuba to the barricades of Paris. This extraordinary biography peels aside the veil of the Guevara legend to reveal the charismatic, restless man behind it.Drawing on archival materials from three continents and on interviews with Guevara's family and associates, Castaneda follows Che from his childhood in ...

A concise, readable and thoroughly revised overview of Cuba written by Cubans for anyone interested in quickly understanding the island country’s turbulent history.Cuba: A Brief History covers the pre-Hispanic period, through Cuba’s struggle to maintain the revolution in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the period after Fidel Castro’s decision to step down from office, to the 2014 opening to Cuba by the Obama Administration, the ret...

The final, revised, edition of Burnett Bolloten’s exhaustive and indispensable, 50-year-long scholarly study of Republican/revolutionary politics in the Spanish Civil War (“The Grand Camouflage:, 1961; “The Spanish Revolution”, 1979; “The Spanish Civil War: Revolution and Counterrevolution”, 1986), covers the entire period of the war from 1936 to 1939. Welsh-born Bolloten, initially a Communist Party fellow-traveller, was a war correspondent for United Press who ...

Told for the first time in English, Paul Preston’s new book tells the story of a preventable tragedy that cost many thousands of lives and ruined tens of thousands more at the end of the Spanish Civil War.This is the story of an avoidable humanitarian tragedy that cost many thousands of lives and ruined tens of thousands more.On 5 March 1939, the eternally malcontent Colonel Segismundo Casado launched a military coup against the government of Juan Negrín. To fulfil his ambi...

Che Guevara is a legend. The son of Argentine intellectuals, he became first a physician, then a brilliant tactician who helped lead the revolution in Cuba, then an enduring, almost mythical icon of revolutionary struggles all over the world. Though he was killed more than 30 years ago, his name and image remain uniquely compelling and mysterious. What makes him so fascinating? What actions and accomplishments set him apart from his contemporaries and continue to capture our imagination to...