History

Winner of the Linda Peterson Award for Best Essay in Media History
Winner of the Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research

This research project focuses on Nationalist propaganda aimed at American and British citizens during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The paper’s main argument is that Nationalist pamphlets, most printed by Catholic publishing houses, aimed to maintain American and British non-intervention in the Spanish Conflict. To do this, these pamphlets presented the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) and those that fought on its behalf as a threat to Western Civilization. Portraying the Republican forces as communists, atheists, and thus as anti-West served as a vital tool to foster hostility towards the Republic and sympathy for Francisco Franco’s forces by the American and British populace. This propaganda attempted to contribute to Republican difficulties in attaining sufficient military and economic aid to fight the Nationalist army. Most of the primary sources analyzed in this paper were found in the Spanish Civil War collections at University California, Los Angeles and Loyola Marymount University. To my knowledge, select pamphlets studied in this paper have not been used in published works relating to the Spanish Civil War. Thus, this paper aims to fill a gap in the existing historiography on the War, a conflict that is largely overshadowed by the Second World War that followed it.

This essay explores the Mexican Catholic community’s reasonings for supporting Franco’s CatholicNationalist movement during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The writing that exists on Mexican society’s positioning towards the war generally stress the governmental and leftist support for the Second Spanish Republic. It seems, however, that by studying the arguments made by the Mexican right in publications such as Chrístus, Unión, Razón y Fé, and Omega, we can better comprehend the the turbulent reality of Mexico’s 1930’s. The Mexican right viewed the Spanish Civil War as the existential crusade that would determine the outcome of a battle many Mexicans felt they had been fighting for decades. Liberalism, atheism, and communism, they argued, were responsible for the social and moral decay brought about by the likes of Juárez, Calles, and Cárdenas. Thus it was Generalissimo Franco who emerged as the savior for many Mexican Catholics who grew tired of their perceived and real marginalization.

Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the US Occupation of Japan Patti Duncan Feminist Formations, Volume 22, Number 1, Spring 2010, pp. 204-209 (Review) ... Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008, 226 pp., $54.50 hardcover. Patti Duncan ...