"This book is a biography of Pueblonuevo del Terrible, a mining town located in Andalusia, Spain. Based on previously unexamined sources, the study paints a fresh portrait of industrial workers and their families in Câordoba province, enriching our understanding of this mostly agricultural region. As such, this book tells a village-scale story of global events that defined the twentieth century"--
This book is a biography of Pueblonuevo del Terrible, a mining town located in Andalusia, Spain. Based on previously unexamined sources, the study paints a fresh portrait of industrial workers and their families in Córdoba province, enriching our understanding of this mostly agricultural region. Previous studies of laboring communities in Spain have identified radical workers, miners among them, as a destabilizing element due to their insurgent protest activity, including lethal violence. This study, by contrast, describes both worker activism and cross-class organizing as constructive, not destructive, and aimed at integration into Spanish society. Economically, the mining zone was dominated by a French company in the Rothschild portfolio. But by running their own city, waging peaceful labor strikes, raising a church, building housing, and honoring their dead, residents turned a quasi-colonial outpost into a pueblo worth defending, and they rallied in defense of the Republic at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In the making of Pueblonuevo del Terrible, Spanish men and women contended with the perils of mine work, the jolts of industrial capitalism, creeping fascism, and civil war. As such, this book tells a village-scale story of global events that defined the twentieth century.
This book offers an original reading of Carlo Ginzburg’s work, tracing his trajectory in the context of Italian micro-history, his debates on the objectivity of historical knowledge, and the connection of his work to the expanded perspectives constructed in recent decades by global history. Ginzburg's theories have achieved notoriety not only in the field of history but also among the wider public. This volume uses Ginzburg’s own aesthetic and intellectual practices in its analysis, and it deciphers the elements that drove and influenced the making of his work. By highlighting the procedures that Ginzburg has constructed to respond to problems of cultural history, the book also pays close attention to Erich Auerbach and Aby Warburg, whose influences played a crucial role in reformulating Ginzburg’s conception of micro-history. From there, the volume demonstrates the radicality of Ginzburg's micro-history through the discussion of some of his most recent contributions to international historiographical debates. Thought-provoking and thoroughly researched, Deciphering Carlo Ginzburg is an innovative study in Ginzburg’s methods and theories.
In the spring of 1757, the Augustinian friar Leopoldo di San Pasquale was tried in Naples by the hierarchies of his own religious order on charges of financial fraud, heresy, and sexual immorality. He responded by accusing the heads of the convent of subjecting him to a series of inhuman cruelties, claiming to have been "buried alive". While waiting for a final judgment (it was pronounced seven years later, in 1764), the trial of Leopoldo di San Pasquale became a cultural phenomenon unlike any witnessed before in Naples. Cumulatively, reactions to the trial, both during and after it, broke the boundaries separating chronicle and literary fiction, engaged people’s faculties of reason and emotion, and ultimately transformed Leopoldo into a public spectacle—or what we might call today a “celebrity.” Focusing on the scandalous affair of the "buried alive", this book shows how the governing authorities in Naples managed the development of news and stories around current events through their systems of courts and bureaucracies. It also aims to demonstrate how, just as importantly, consumers played an increasing in the spread of information, as means to political empowerment. The sources analyzed call for a microhistorical analysis, as well as for an interdisciplinary discussion with media studies at its conceptual core. A Criminal Hero will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in microhistory, cultural history, media history, history of literature, social and political history, with a focus on the eighteenth century.
"The Spanish Civil War was fought from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939 between the Republicans, who were loyal to the established Spanish Republic, and the Nationalists, a rebel group led by General Francisco Franco. The Nationalists prevailed, and Franco ruled Spain for the next 36 years, from 1939 until his death in 1975."--Wikipedia.
Most histories of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) have examined major leaders or well-established political and social groups to explore class, gender, and ideological struggles. The war in Spain was marked by momentous conflicts between democracy and dictatorship, Communism and fascism, anarchism and authoritarianism, and Catholicism and anticlericalism that still provoke our fascination. In Republic of Egos, Michael Seidman focuses instead on the personal and individual experiences of the common men and women who were actors in a struggle that defined a generation and helped to shape our world. By examining the roles of anonymous individuals, families, and small groups who fought for their own interests and survival—and not necessarily for an abstract or revolutionary cause—Seidman reveals a powerful but rarely considered pressure on the outcome of history. He shows how price controls and inflation in the Republican zone encouraged peasant hoarding, black marketing, and unrest among urban workers. Soldiers of the Republican Army responded to material shortages by looting, deserting, and fraternizing with the enemy. Seidman’s focus on average, seemingly nonpolitical individuals provides a new vision of both the experience and outcome of the war.
Pioneering African American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) is widely remembered for her courageous antilynching crusade in the 1890s; the full range of her struggles against injustice is not as well known. With this book, Patricia Schechter restores Wells-Barnett to her central, if embattled, place in the early reform movements for civil rights, women's suffrage, and Progressivism in the United States and abroad. Schechter's comprehensive treatment makes vivid the scope of Wells-Barnett's contributions and examines why the political philosophy and leadership of this extraordinary activist eventually became marginalized. Though forced into the shadow of black male leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington and misunderstood and then ignored by white women reformers such as Frances E. Willard and Jane Addams, Wells-Barnett nevertheless successfully enacted a religiously inspired, female-centered, and intensely political vision of social betterment and empowerment for African American communities throughout her adult years. By analyzing her ideas and activism in fresh sharpness and detail, Schechter exposes the promise and limits of social change by and for black women during an especially violent yet hopeful era in U.S. history.
This study explores two categories—empire and citizenship—that historians usually study separately. It does so with a unifying focus on racialization in the lives of outstanding women whose careers crossed national borders between 1880 and 1965. It puts an individual, intellectual, and female face on transnational phenomena.
