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youthful romanticism in the style of writing that would have been impossible for me to sustain ten or twenty years later, but which probably helped to convey the human drama of the Spanish disaster of those years. At any rate, the first printing in English sold out and soon led to a second, which meant that the book remained available on the market at the Stanford University Press for thirty-five years, until 1996. Ruedo Ibérico undoubtedly sold even more copies in Spanish, but José Martínez never issued royalty reports to his authors in the manner of a normal publisher, so one never knew. Ruedo Ibérico always struggled financially as an émigré press, unable to sell directly in Spain, and depended on the sales of a few particular titles to stay afloat. 14 We generally understood this and did not complain when years sometimes passed without any payment of royalties.
    The year 1961 was in fact the time of the emergence of contemporary Spanish history as a scholarly field in English, with the publication of Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War and Burnett Bolloten's The Grand Camouflage , on the fate of the revolution in the Republican zone, as well as my own book. There was a kind of symmetry between them, with one history of the Civil War in general, a second on the Left, and a third on the Right. The most important of these was Thomas's book, even though its first edition carried the inevitable number of minor errors. It was a major scholarly achievement, and the product of a young autodidact abroad, Thomas being only three years older than myself.
    At the time that his book appeared, I had been working for some months on a history of the Spanish Civil War of my own, but quickly concluded that at that stage I would be unable to improve on Thomas's work. I soon decided to follow up on Vicens's suggestion of the importance of a book on the politics of the military, being able to carry out a full year of research on it in Spain during 1962-63, thanks to a Guggenheim fellowship, which came as a result of the book on the Falange and especially of the good offices of my senior colleague at Minnesota, John B. Wolf, a noted specialist on the history of seventeenth-century France.
    I had first returned to Spain in the summer of 1961, where my efforts were devoted to preparing a brief study on the historiography of Vicens Vives, which became my first major article. 15 Most of that summer was devoted to an extensive honeymoon with my new bride, Julia Sherman, a psychologist from Minneapolis, as we spent nearly two and a half months crisscrossing Europe on Eurail passes. Among many other adventures, we twice passed through the Berlin Wall during the first week of its construction.
    The year 1962-63, dedicated to researching the politics of the military, was memorable for a number of things, but perhaps most of all because it was the last full year that I spent in Spain in which the old social and cultural order was largely intact. After May 1963 I passed the longest period of my life without returning to the country. I was busy with a new position in UCLA, developing new courses, and becoming a father, and I did not return to Spain until September 1967, a period of more than four years. The mid-1960s constituted a turning point in economic development, and when I got back to Madrid I found that things were not the same. It was not merely that the number of automobiles had greatly increased, so that I encountered the first major "modern" traffic jams that I had ever seen in Spain, but more importantly that social and cultural attitudes were also changing rapidly. The ambience was much more liberal and more hedonist, almost exaggeratedly so, much more in line with attitudes and values in contemporary western Europe.
    Research on the politics of the military was in some ways more difficult than working on the Falange, the possibilities of oral history greatly reduced. I spent a considerable amount of time that year at the Servicio