Spain: A Unique History Read Free

the University of California-Berkeley in order to begin the study of the Russian language. In retrospect, however, I never necessarily curse inefficient mail service, because in 1955 it had possibly changed the course of my life for the better. I received only one good offer of a fellowship to begin graduate study in 1955. It came from the Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont University), one of the cluster of colleges in Claremont, at the eastern end of Los Angeles County in Southern California. Claremont provided the encouragement to begin work on Spanish history and also an attractive and supportive environment for me to gain the experience needed to make the transition from a small college in a rural setting in northern California to a much more complex and sophisticated scholarly environment in Columbia University and the city of New York two years later.
    It was during the summer of 1955 that I first developed an interest in Spain as a possible area of research, stemming from two books that I read at that time. One was a treatment of Spanish society and culture, The Spanish Temper (1954), by the noted British literary critic (and avocational Hispanist) V. S. Pritchett; the other was a book on Spanish art history, focusing especially on the Middle Ages, whose title and author I have long since forgotten. These two works were in fact the first that I had ever selected to read on Spain (aside from the minimal reading required in literature courses) and both fired my imagination, for the very first time giving me the idea that Spain might be a genuinely interesting — and original — area of study. Since at Claremont I had been accepted in modern European history but was obviously not going to be specializing in Russia — a field not then offered at Claremont — I had to find a focus for my initial research.
    The faculty at Claremont were completely receptive to the idea of working on Spain, which seemed to them both valid and original. I had two different faculty advisors, the first being Henry Cord Meyer in German history, who served as my Europeanist advisor. I also worked for him as a research assistant and learned a great deal from him about becoming a professional scholar and about European history more generally.
    There was no one at Claremont who specialized in the modern history of Spain, as indeed no such field was offered in any other graduate school, though a very few American scholars, such as C. J. Bishko at Virginia, worked in earlier Spanish history. Gabriel Jackson at that time was teaching at Wellesley College, but this was a women's institution with no doctoral program. At Claremont I was therefore referred to the only professor who taught Latin American history, Hubert Herring. This was a fortunate encounter, for at that time Herring was one of the few Latin Americanists in the United States with an interest in Spain. Herring had been at one time a Protestant missionary in Latin America, but later turned to an academic career and was best known for a popular textbook on general Latin American history, Good Neighbors , published in 1955. He had visited Spain three times and at least had some sense of the country.
    Herring encouraged my interest and also suggested a very fruitful research topic. I myself had few ideas about that, for the notion of working on Spain had just entered my mind, and I had had neither time nor opportunity for the preliminary reading needed to select a topic. I believe that I first suggested Manuel Azaña as a topic; besides Franco, he was one of the few figures in contemporary Spanish history that I had even heard of. Little did I suspect that he would later become a sort of bête noire of mine.
    Herring, to his credit, wanted me to do something different and rather more original. He suggested the figure of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, whom I had never heard of, but I responded instinctively to Herring's guidance and to what seemed to me an interesting project. This