Adult Nonfiction

The Silence of Others reveals the epic struggle of victims of Spain’s 40-year dictatorship under General Franco as they continue to seek justice four decades into democracy. Filmed over six years, the film follows the survivors organizing the groundbreaking “Argentine Lawsuit” to fight a state-imposed amnesia of crimes against humanity, where the emotional court battle uncovers a country still divided over its fascist history.

Aguilar, Paloma. Politics of Memory. Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
The book explores the important aspect of transitional politics, assessing how Portugal, Spain, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Germany after reunification, Russia, the Southern Cone of Latin America and Central America, as well as South Africa, have confronted legacies of repression.

Aguilar, Paloma. “The Timing and the Scope of Reparation, Truth and Justice Measures: A Comparison of the Spanish, Argentinian and Chilean Cases.” In Building a Future on Peace and Justice. Studies on Transitional Justice, Peace and Development. The Nuremberg Declaration on Peace and Justice.Ambos, Kai, Judith Large and Marieke Wierda, ed. Berlín: Springer, 2009.
This book addresses these dilemmas through a thorough overview of the current state of legal obligations; discussion of the need for a holistic approach including development; analysis of the implications of the coming into force of the ICC; and a series of "hard" case studies on internationalized and local approaches devised to navigate the tensions between peace and justice.

Encarnación, Omar G. “Justice in Times of Transition: Lessons from the Iberian Experience.” In Center for European Studies Working Paper Series, no.173, 2009.
This essay challenges this common assumption with empirical evidence from the Iberian Peninsula, where the global wave of democratization of the late twentieth century was born. In Portugal, political trials and bureaucratic purges intended to cleanse the state and society of the authoritarian past nearly derailed the transition to democracy by descending into a veritable political witch-hunt. In Spain, by contrast, forgetting and moving on prevailed, an approach that facilitated the country’s emergence as the paradigmatic example of a successful democratic transition.

Espinosa Maestre, Francisco. Shoot the Messenger?: Spanish Democracy and the Crimes of Francoism: From the Pact of Silence to the Trial of Baltasar Garzón. Translated by Richard Barker. East Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2013.
Judge Baltasar Garzon achieved international prestige in 1998 when he pursued the perpetrators of crimes committed in Argentina against Spanish citizens and began proceedings for the arrest of the Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet. But, when Garzon transferred his attention to his Spanish homeland, he was put on trial for opening an investigation into crimes committed by Francoists.

Faber, Sebastiaan and James D. Fernández, “The War Before the Lights Went Out: An Interview with Helen Graham.” In The Alba Volunteer. Accessed June 1, 2012
http://www.albavolunteer.org/2010/03/the-war-before-the-lights-went-out-an-interview-with-helen-graham/An interview with Helen Graham, the most prominent English-speaking historian of twentieth-century Spain.

Faber, Sebastiaan. Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War: History, Fiction, Photography. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2018.
The ability to forget the violent twentieth-century past was long seen as a virtue in Spain, even a duty. But the common wisdom has shifted as increasing numbers of Spaniards want to know what happened, who suffered, and who is to blame. Memory Battles of the Spanish Civil War shows how historiography, fiction, and photography have shaped our views of the 1936-39 war and its long, painful aftermath.

Faber, Sebastiaan & Bécquer Seguín, “Spaniards Confront the Legacy of Civil War and Dictatorship.” The Nation 18 July 2016.
Four decades after the transition to democracy, families victimized by Francoist repression have organized in a quest for justice.

FERRÁNDIZ, Francisco. Unburials, Generals, and Phantom Militarism:
Engaging with the Spanish Civil War Legacy. 2019.
This paper is based on a 16-year-long ethnography of mass grave exhumations in contemporary Spain and deals with the tortuous, painful, much-disputed, and incomplete unmaking of a concrete and massive militaristic inscription of Spain: that related to its last internal war (1936–1939) and subsequent dictatorship (1939–1975).

Graham, Helen. The Spanish Civil War. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Amid the many catastrophes of the twentieth century, the Spanish Civil War continues to exert a particular fascination among history buffs and the lay reader alike. This Very Short Introduction integrates the political, social and cultural history of the Spanish Civil War.

Graham, Helen. The War and Its Shadow: Spain's Civil War in Europe's Long Twentieth Century. East Sussex: Sussex Press, 2014, Kindle Edition.
In Spain today, its civil war remains 'the past that will not pass away.' The long shadow of World War II also brings back to central focus its most disquieting aspects, revealing to a broader public the stark truth already known by specialist historians - that in Spain, as in the many other internecine wars that would soon convulse Europe, war was waged predominantly upon civilians: millions were killed, not by invaders and strangers, but by their own compatriots, including their own neighbors.

Graham, Helen. “After the Fear Was Over? What Came After Dictatorships in Spain, Greece and Portugal.” In The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, Stone, Dan ed. London: Oxford University Press, 2012.
What Spain, Greece, and Portugal have in common in the twentieth century is the manner in which their internal processes of change – rural to urban, agrarian to industrial – were intervened in and inflected at crucial moments and with enduring effect by the force of international political agendas.

Hooper, John. The New Spaniards. London: Penguin, 2006.
The restoration of democracy in 1977 heralded a period of intense change that continues today. Spain has become a land of extraordinary paradoxes in which traditional attitudes and contemporary preoccupations exist side by side. Focusing on issues which affect ordinary Spaniards, from housing to gambling, from changing sexual mores to rising crime rates. John Hooper's fascinating study brings to life the new Spain of the twenty-first century.

Kaufman, Dan. 2011. “A Secret Archive: On the Mexican Suitcase.” The Nation 24 Jan.
http://www.thenation.com/article/secret-archive-mexican-suitcase/The 4,500 images in the recently discovered Mexican Suitcase deepen our understanding of photojournalism as well as the complexities of the Spanish Civil War.

Payne Stanley G., and Jesús Palacios. Franco: A Personal and Political Biography. University of Wisconsin Press, 2018.
Franco: A Personal and Political Biography depicts his early life, explains his career and rise to prominence as an army officer who became Europe’s youngest interwar brigadier general in 1926, and then discusses his role in the affairs of the troubled Second Spanish Republic (1931–36). The authors examine in detail how Franco became dictator and how his leadership led to victory in the Spanish Civil War that consolidated his regime. They also explore Franco’s role in the great repression that accompanied the Civil War—resulting in tens of thousands of executions—and examine at length his controversial role in World War II. This masterful biography highlights Franco’s metamorphoses and adaptations to retain power as politics, culture, and economics shifted in the four decades of his dictatorship.

Paul Preston is the world's foremost historian on twentieth-century Spain. A professor at the London School of Economics, he lives in London. His major works include the three following titles.

Preston, Paul. Franco: A Biography. BasicBooks, 1994.
Preston’s book is considered a definitive biography of the Spanish military leader whose authoritarian rule extended from the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 to his death in 1975.

Preston, Paul.The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. London: Harper Collins, 2012.
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 torture and judicial murders to the abuse of women and children. Paul Preston provides an unforgettable account of the systematic terror carried out by Spain’s fascist government.

Resina, Joan Ramon, ed. Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory since the Spanish Transition to Democracy. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.
Most accounts of the Spanish transition to democracy have been celebratory exercises at the service of a stabilizing rather than a critical project of far-reaching reform.

Roht-Arriaza, Naomi. The Pinochet Effect. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
The 1998 arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in London and subsequent extradition proceedings sent an electrifying wave through the international community. This legal precedent for bringing a former head of state to trial outside his home country signaled that neither the immunity of a former head of state nor legal amnesties at home could shield participants in the crimes of military governments

The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge.W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.
This surging history recounts the struggles of the 1936 war in which more than 3,000 Americans took up arms. Tracking the emergence of Francisco Franco's brutal (and, ultimately, extraordinarily durable) fascist dictatorship, Preston assesses the ways in which the Spanish Civil War presaged the Second World War that ensued so rapidly after it.
The attempted social revolution in Spain awakened progressive hopes during the Depression, but the conflict quickly escalated into a new and horrific form of warfare. As Preston shows, the unprecedented levels of brutality were burned into the American consciousness as never before by the revolutionary war reporting of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Herbert Matthews, Vincent Sheean, Louis Fischer, and many others. Completely revised, including previously unseen material on Franco's treatment of women in wartime prisons, The Spanish Civil War is a classic work on this pivotal epoch.

The Triumph of Democracy in Spain. Methuen, 1986.
The Triumph of Democracy in Spain tells a gripping story of the tortuous creation of Spain's constitutional monarchy. The book provides an authoritative account of the tribulations of the forces of progress, beginning in 1969 with the disintegration of Franco's dictatorship and ending with the remarkable Socialist election victory in 1982.

Shulman, Aaron. The Age of Disenchantments: The Epic Story of Spain's Most Notorious Literary Family and the Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War. HarperCollins, 2019.
A gripping narrative history of Spain’s most brilliant and troubled literary family—a tale about the making of art, myth, and legacy—set against the upheaval of the Spanish Civil War and beyond In this absorbing and atmospheric historical narrative, journalist Aaron Shulman takes us deeply into the circumstances surrounding the Spanish Civil War through the lives, loves, and poetry of the Paneros, Spain’s most compelling and eccentric family, whose lives intersected memorably with many of the most storied figures in the art, literature, and politics of the time—from Neruda to Salvador Dalí, from Ava Gardner to Pablo Picasso to Roberto Bolaño.

Tusell, Javier. Spain: From Dictatorship to Democracy. Wiley, 2007.
This comprehensive survey of Spain’s history looks at the major political, social, and economic changes that took place from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the twenty-first century.