In 25 innovative thematic essays, The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Spanish Civil War sees an interdisciplinary team of scholars examine a conflict that, more than 80 years after its conclusion, continues to generate both scholarly and public controversy.

Split into four main sections covering Military and Diplomatic Issues, Society and Culture, Politics, and Debates, the volume offers a number of unique features. It is unprecedented in its comprehensiveness and includes chapters on topics that are rarely, if ever, explored in the literature of the field: humanitarianism, children and families, material conditions, the decimation of elites, archives and sources, archaeological approaches, digital approaches, public history, and cultural studies approaches.

Instead of discussing each of the two warring sides, Republicans and Francoists, separately, as is so often the case, the book's thematic structure means that these opposing forces are examined together, facilitating comparison and fresh understanding in numerous areas of study. Contributors from the UK, the USA, Canada, Spain and Denmark also analyse the major controversies and disputes surrounding each topic as part of a detailed exploration of one of the seminal events of the 20th century.

Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Trent University, Canada. He is the author of nine books, including (with Alison Ribeiro de Menezes and Adrian Shubert), Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War: Memory and the Digital in Contested Histories (2018), Franco: The Biography of the Myth (2013) and Fear and Progress: Ordinary Lives in Franco's Spain (2009).

Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She has published widely on literature, film and cultural memory in contemporary Spain and Portugal. Her most recent monograph is Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain (2014).

Adrian Shubert is University Professor of History at York University, Toronto, Canada. He is the author of A Social History of Modern Spain, 1800-1990 (1990) and Death and Money in the Afternoon: A History of the Spanish Bullfight (2001) and the co-editor, along with José Alvarez Junco, of The History of Modern Spain (Bloomsbury, 2017). His awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Killam Research Fellowship, and being named a Commander of the Order of Civil Merit by King Juan Carlos.