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Histórico Militar, then on the calle de los Mártires de Alcalá, and used the same heterogeneous mix of source materials that had been employed in the Falangist study. The resulting book was published by Stanford in 1967 and soon afterward in a Spanish edition by Ruedo Ibérico. Its most important finding was that in political terms the military were not as much of an independent variable as most of us had thought. Although they had intervened, or tried to intervene, many times between 1814 and 1936, these interventions, whether successful or not, were much more dependent on general political variables than on the purely independent volition or ambitions of the military. This book was also very well received, particularly in a major review by Gerald Brenan in the New York Times Book Review .
    It was completed after I had moved to Los Angeles, where I taught at UCLA from 1963 to 1968, passing rapidly through the ranks from assistant professor to full professor, and serving also as vice-chairman of the department (my first term in administration) in 1967-68. Though I had lived the greater share of my early life in California, and though in the mid-twentieth century Los Angeles had remained a very attractive city, that too was changing rapidly by the 1960s. The enormous expansion and crowding, the massive volume of traffic on the freeways and elsewhere, the growth of smog and other pollution, and the pervasive influence of a peculiarly Southern California/Hollywood form of hedonism and materialism — all contributed to an increasingly disagreeable ambiance. My wife and I decided in 1968 that we would be happier in a more tranquil and stable environment at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, whose environs were rather more similar to those of a major European university, such as Cambridge or Marburg, located in a small city.
    During the Los Angeles years I was also involved in my first major undertaking in broader European history, being asked by my old mentor Shepard Clough to write part of a new multivolume textbook called A History of the Western World (but meaning essentially the history of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the ancient Near East, at least in the original version.) Together with Otto Pflanze, the noted historian of Germany, who had been my colleague at Minnesota, I wrote the third volume on nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe, published in December 1964. This project went through two revised editions during the next eight years, in which it was broadened to become one of the first of the subsequently fashionable histories of the world. It also became more extensively illustrated, enjoying a viable commercial life of about a decade and a half, the first publishing project from which I drew any significant income in royalties.
    I was also asked by the New York publishing firm Thomas Y. Crowell to write a very brief study of the contemporary situation in Spain, which became the short volume Franco's Spain (1967). This took little time, but was my first effort to analyze and summarize recent developments in all the major aspects of Spanish affairs, dealing with social and economic changes, cultural life, and international relations, as well as with the politics of the Franco regime.
    The 1960s were a decade of greatly expanded interest in history in all the Western world. The student activists who became famous in that era were especially attracted to history, but beyond that, general cultural conditions stimulated enrollment in history courses among the enormously expanded student populations of that decade. Interest in history courses among university students generally follows a sort of cyclical pattern. The 1960s were an especial high point and enormously stimulated the zeal of publishers to bring out new history books. More than at any other time in my experience, they took the initiative in offering lucrative contracts to historians, rather than simply responding to manuscripts presented by the