La verdad triunfará
March 1, 2012 5:04 AM   Subscribe

In Hiding:The Life of Manuel Cortes the Socialist barber and mayor who hid inside his house for 30 years to escape Francoist retribution was the first publication by the noted oral historian Ronald Fraser who has recently died aged 81.
A gifted and prolific historian of Spain, Fraser helped establish oral history as a discipline in its own right.
His civil war opus Blood of Spain confirmed his scholarship.
He had a long association with the New Left Review which he helped found.
His last publication was Napoleon’s Cursed War: Popular Resistance in the Spanish Peninsular War.
posted by adamvasco (5 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Blood of Spain is fantastic. I remember the Franco era.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 6:16 AM on March 1, 2012


Never heard of him, but now must track down the Napoleon book. Many thanks
posted by IndigoJones at 8:18 AM on March 1, 2012


Beevor's The Battle for Spain is also a great book if you're looking for a somewhat impartial view of the mechanics employed by all sides during the Spanish Civil War.

One thing I've always found fascinating is that in order to obtain a sense of recent Spanish history, one must almost always rely on a foreign source to provide a pragmatic view as Spaniards by nature secretive, partial, forgetful and in many senses afraid to analyze their past and discover for themselves how they've arrived at their present situation.

To this day, they can hardly bring themselves to open the common graves and exhume the victims, as if a collective shame should best remain buried and only referred to in the offhand as an unexplained event.
posted by jsavimbi at 8:47 AM on March 1, 2012


.

If you can find video of Fraser Speaking Spanish, I'd like to see it. I'd swear I saw a long interview with him as a child, but it doesn't seem to be online.

Also, and I say this as a Spaniard, 1000+ to what jsavimbi said. Thank Mercy for serious foreign scholars and hispanophiles.
posted by kandinski at 3:53 PM on March 1, 2012


kandinski; all i found whilest writing this post was this collection housed at the University of Liverpool.
There might be something here in this Channel 4 broadcast from 1983.
posted by adamvasco at 6:01 AM on March 2, 2012


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