This exhibit features a sampling of materials from Special Collections & Archives: Southworth Spanish Civil War Collection.
About the Collection:
In July 1936, officers of the Spanish military initiated an uprising against their own Republican government in Spanish-held Morocco, as other planned uprisings were held throughout mainland Spain. General Francisco Franco took charge of the military coup and Spain was soon embroiled in a civil war.
As historian Matt Crawford has written:
“Beyond the implications of the civil war in terms of Spain’s own history, the war is viewed, retrospectively, as a prelude to the larger ideological conflicts between fascism, communism, and democracy that eventually consumed all of Europe in World War II. The Spanish Civil War is also remembered as a testing ground for new techniques and technologies of both 20th-century warfare — as immortalized in the bombing of Guernica — and 20th-century media as represented by the rise of war photography and photojournalism.”
UC San Diego’s Southworth Spanish Civil War Collection documents the 1936-1939 war, as well as the immediate post-war years in Spain. Herbert Southworth, an American journalist closely associated with the elected Republican government both in Spain and in exile, bravely collected as much material about the conflict as he could, even after the war. With the guidance of Gabriel Jackson of UC San Diego’s Department of History, the Library acquired Southworth’s collection in 1966 and has continued to add to it. The collection, the most extensive extant, brings together a wealth of rare materials that includes memoirs, propaganda pamphlets, journals and newspapers, posters and original photographs, and unique drawings made by Spanish children during the war. Many of these materials, subject to censorship or destruction during the war, do not exist elsewhere. Most of them reveal the divisiveness and passion of the opposing factions.
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