The Spanish Civil War

In this episode we talk to author, journalist, and lecturer Adam Hochschild.  His best-known works include King Leopold’s Ghost, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918, Bury the Chains, The Mirror at Midnight, and The Unquiet Ghost. His lastest book, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 is about the history of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism in Spain, and infighting among the left with.

About Spain in Our Hearts

For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we’re accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa’s photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war: a fiery nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman who went to wartime Spain on her honeymoon, a Swarthmore College senior who was the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid, a pair of fiercely partisan, rivalrous New York Times reporters who covered the war from opposites sides, and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies who sold Franco almost all his oil — at reduced prices, and on credit.