Spain: A Unique History Read Online Free PDF

He helped me a great deal in each of the two main fields of inquiry that I would develop — contemporary Spanish history and the comparative history of fascism — so that it was only fitting that in the 1990s. I dedicated two books to him. 13
    The other particularly close friend during the first year in Madrid was Francisco Javier de Lizarza, to whom I was introduced indirectly by Jaime del Burgo. Javier Lizarza, like Juan Linz, was a dear friend for an entire half century, and throughout ever the most reliable and true. Scion of a distinguished Navarrese Carlist family, he led in the effort to maintain the highest ideals of traditionalism in the politically correct society of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Following his death in October 2007, it is appropriate that the present book be dedicated to our half century of the warmest friendship.
    In Madrid I made contact with Clay La Force, also on an SSRC fellowship, who was preparing a dissertation in economic history at UCLA on state industrialization initiatives in the reign of Carlos III, later to be published by the University of California Press. Clay and I would subsequently be colleagues between 1962 and 1968 at UCLA (he in economics, I in history), where he would go on to become the distinguished director of the Graduate School of Business Management.
    In the late autumn of that first year, Juan Linz indicated that we should make the acquaintance of a young American woman "working on Antonio Maura," as current misinformation had it. This turned out to be Joan Connelly Ullman, at that time the director of the Instituto Internacional, who later completed an important dissertation and book on the Semana Trágica, as well as developing an influential career at the University of the Pacific and the University of Washington. She, Clay La Force, and I made up the trio of American dissertators in Madrid that year working on Spanish history of the two preceding centuries, something of a portent of things to come, since we would have many successors.
    Two years later Edward Malefakis, who came right after me at Columbia, would begin his research in Madrid. His dissertation on the Republican agrarian reform would in fact constitute the deepest and most accomplished piece of work of all the American dissertations of those early years. I was fortunate in my fellow-researchers, for all were able scholars and have remained good friends, though in later years the only one whom I would see fairly regularly was Ed Malefakis, especially because of his home in Madrid.
    It was a unique privilege to live and work in Spain before the close of the 1950s, for at that time many aspects of traditional Spanish society and culture were still alive. In those years manners and mores were in fact more formal, hierarchical, and conservative than they had been a quarter-century earlier, a result of the counterrevolution wrought by the Civil War. At that moment I could scarcely have imagined that within no more than a decade — by the late 1960s — the society and culture would have been drastically transformed by a vertiginous process of modernizing change, for good and for ill. I had arrived just in time to witness the final phase of more traditional Spanish life before it disappeared forever. Undoubtedly the new society, eventually a political democracy, would be much freer and more prosperous and also in some ways happier, but it would also lose touch with many of the values, symbols, and mores that had made Spanish society and culture distinctive. Hence in part the obsessive emphasis on fostering local and regional identities, together with the local festivals, that became so marked by the last years of the century.
    A major concern during that first year in Spain was to make my own assessment of the Spanish and their culture (in the sense of ordinary society rather than high culture). The stereotypes of "romantic Spain," thanks to Ernest Hemingway and others, were by no