Brigate Internazionali fu il nome collettivo dato ai gruppi di volontari che si recarono in Spagna, per appoggiare l'esercito repubblicano e combattere le forze fasciste comandate dal generale Francisco Franco, durante la guerra civile spagnola. Le Brigate Internazionali si distinsero nella difesa di Madrid, nella battaglia di Guadalajara e in altre occasioni (vedi seguito). In questo approfondito studio realizzato dall'esperto Bruno Mugnai vengono affrontate tutte le vicende collegate all'epica storia di questi combattenti.
** Shortlisted for the Military History Matters Book of the Year Award ** 'Magnificent. Narrative history at its vivid and compelling best' Fergal Keane The first major history of the International Brigades: a tale of blood, ideals and tragedy in the fight against fascism. The Spanish Civil War was the first armed battle in the fight against fascism, and a rallying cry for a generation. Over 35,000 volunteers from sixty-one countries around the world came to defend democracy against the troops of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. Ill-equipped and disorderly, yet fuelled by a shared sense of purpose and potential glory, these disparate groups of idealistic young men and women formed a volunteer army of a size and type unseen since the Crusades, known as the International Brigades. Were they heroes or fools? Saints or bloodthirsty adventurers? And what exactly did they achieve? In this magisterial history, Giles Tremlett tells – for the first time – the story of the Spanish Civil War through the experiences of this remarkable group. Drawing on the Brigades' archives in Moscow, as well as first-hand accounts, The International Brigades captures all the human drama of a historic mission to halt fascist expansion in Europe.
Between the two world wars, thousands of European antifascists were pushed to act by the political circumstances of the time. In that context, the Spanish Civil War and the armed resistances during the Second World War involved particularly large numbers of transnational fighters. The need to fight fascism wherever it presented itself was undoubtedly the main motivation behind these fighters’ decision to mobilise. Despite all this, however, not enough attention has been paid to the fact that some of these volunteers felt they were the last exponents of a tradition of armed volunteering which, in their case, originated in the nineteenth century. The capacity of war volunteering to endure and persist over time has rarely been investigated in historiography. The aim of this book is to reconstruct the radical and transnational tradition of war volunteering connected to Giuseppe Garibaldi’s legacy in Southern Europe between the unification of Italy (1861) and the end of the Second World War (1945). This book seeks to provide a comprehensive analysis of the long-term, interconnected, and radical dimensions of the so called Garibaldinism.
No political parties of present-day Germany are separated by a wider gulf than the two parties of labor, one democratic and reformist, the other totalitarian and socialist-revolutionary. Social Democrats and Communists today face each other as bitter political enemies across the front lines of the Cold War; yet they share a common origin in the Social Democratic Party of Imperial Germany. How did they come to go separate ways? By what process did the old party break apart? How did the prewar party prepare the ground for the dissolution of the labor movement in World War I, and for the subsequent extension of Leninism into Germany? To answer these questions is the purpose of Carl Schorske's study.
The army and the navy of Venice and Ottoman Empire during the campaigns fought for the possession of the 'pearl of the Mediterranean'. The legendary Venetian resistance impressed the courts of whole Europe, transforming the conflict in the 'Campo di Marte' of the continent.
The transatlantic world has had immense influence on the direction of world history. The six illuminating studies in Transatlantic History address cultural exchanges and intercontinental developments that contribute to our modern understanding of global communities. Transatlantic history encompasses a variety of scholarly problems and approaches from multiple disciplines, and volume editors Steven G. Reinhardt and Dennis P. Reinhartz have assembled a collection of essays that reflect the diversity within the field. Introducing the book, William McNeill provides a unifying overview of the concept and practice of transatlantic history by placing it within the larger context of world history. The chapter authors bring distinctive styles and methods to the investigation of the processes of interaction and adaptation among Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans. Their studies range from the Spanish imperial crisis in the 1600s to the urbanization of Europe and the Americas, from graphic portrayals of the Atlantic world to the settlement of Ireland, America, and South Africa and the recent diaspora of West Africans. Readers interested in world history, communication, and cultural studies will find Transatlantic History provocative and challenging as it convincingly argues for the importance of this new field.
