Historians at War: Cold War Influences on Anglo-American Representations of the Spanish Civil War

Historians at War examines how the works of four Anglo-American ‘writer-historians’, who are widely accepted as contributing to the foundational analysis of the Spanish conflict, were shaped not just by the events of the past, but by the political climate of the time in which they were written. Using a plethora of primary materials, including archival documents and first-person accounts, Dr Burrowes scrutinizes the lives and works of two novelists, George Orwell and Gerald Brenan, and of two Spanish Civil War specialist historians, Burnett Bolloten and Herbert Southworth, in order to determine to what extent these writers participated in the murky cultural politics generated by the Cold War’s rabid anti-communist climate, and how they presented and interpreted the roles played by the Spanish Communist Party and the USSR in Spain’s Second Spanish Republic and its Civil War.