Pamela BethRadcliff, From Mobilisation to Civil War: The Politics ofPolarisation in the Spanish City of Gijón, 1900–1937(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 354 pp., £40, ISBN0–521–56213–9.

Carolyn Boyd, Historia Patria: Politics, History, and National Identity in Spain, 1875–1975(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 358 pp., $49.50,£35.00, ISBN 0–691–02656–4.

Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire 1898–1923 (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1997), 269 pp., £35.00, ISBN0–198–20507–4.

Clare Mar-Molinero and Angel Smith,eds., Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula: Competingand Conflicting Identities (Oxford/Washington, DC: Berg, 1996),281 pp., £34.95, pb £14.95, ISBN1–859–73175–9.

Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's Spain,1936–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 314pp., £40.00, $59.95, ISBN 0–521–59401–4.

Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: the Untold Story of the Spanish CivilWar (London: John Murray, 1998), 354 pp., £25, ISBN0–719–55556–6.

During the long years of Francoism,Spanish historiography was dominated by a search for explanation.Against the regime's triumphalist account of the‘essential’ Spain – resurgent in the form of thevictorious general's authoritarian, confessional state –exiled intellectuals such as Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz and AméricoCastro posed questions about the ‘problem’ of Spain, lookingto the country's past to explain the political violence of thepresent. For those who won the Civil War of 1936–39, Spain'snational destiny was to remain true to the imperial, Catholic legacy ofthe Habsburg monarchy. Eschewing modern ‘decadence’ and thefalse paths of secularism and democracy, Spain was to remain, accordingto Franco, the ‘spiritual reserve of the west’. Such avision of history, in Mike Richards's words, ‘appropriatedtime itself in acknowledging no distinctions between past, present andfuture’ (Mar-Molinero and Smith, p. 152). To Francoist ideologues,both history and the nation were understood in terms of providentialdestiny: once understood, the national destiny would proveimmutable.