HIST 488 : Europe, 1914 to the Present: Websites

The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 with the far-right Nationalists’ attempted coup of Spain’s leftist, duly elected Republican government; it ended in 1939, after much bloodshed, with a Nationalist victory, Spain under the leadership of Franco, and an alliance of right-wing Spanish political parties.

The League existed from 1919 to 1946. Although Russia and the United States refused to join, its members included countries from Africa, Asia, Europe and North and South America. The documents in this digitized collection focus on three areas: the founding of the League, international statistics published by the League, and the League's work toward international disarmament. To promote peace and security, the League reduced national armaments and prevented the manufacture of implements of war. Most of the publications in this digital collection concern disarmament.

Nearly 12,000 men made this choice, and many women voluntarily joined the cause. They fought forest fires, worked in mental institutions, planted trees, did dairy testing and served as subjects for medical experiments in more than 150 camps scattered throughout the United States.

Text documents are "keyword" searchable, but have been edited from the original, meaning that handwriting and signatures has been deciphered, and OCR errors have been corrected. Original documents serve as snapshots in time, and also as touchstones by which the researcher can judge the text conversions.

The digital collection consists chiefly of summary transcripts of 705 interviews conducted with refugees from the USSR during the early years of the Cold War. A unique source for the study of Soviet society between 1917 and the mid-1940s, the HPSSS includes vast amounts of one-of-a-kind data on political, economic, social and cultural conditions.