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latter. Altogether, I accepted four publishers' initiatives during the 1960s — the aforementioned textbook, the short project on contemporary Spain, a proposal to prepare a history of the Spanish revolution of the 1930s, and also the suggestion that I develop a general history of Spain and Portugal.
    The Spanish Revolution stemmed from the invitation of Jack Greene, a specialist in the era of the American Revolution of the 1770s, to write one of ten volumes in a series called Revolutions in the Modern World. That a volume on Spain was even included demonstrated considerable perspicacity by Greene, since many general and comparative treatments of modern revolutions tend to ignore the Spanish case. I was certainly aware of the presence of the revolutionary worker movements and of the revolution in the Republican zone during the Civil War, but knew little about them. My research was initially assisted by two special collections that had become available in California, the Southworth Collection at the University of California-San Diego and the Bolloten Collection in the Hoover Institution at Stanford, both particularly rich in materials from the Republican zone. 16 Data on the CNT-FAI, as well as the POUM, were also available at the Institutional Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, but I would not be able to gain access to the Civil War archive in Salamanca (then generally closed to researchers) for another five years.
    Research for this book would turn out to mark a kind of watershed in my grasp of Spanish politics. I had been brought up in the standard politically correct understanding of contemporary Spanish affairs, which holds that the Right was iniquitous, reactionary and authoritarian, while the Left (despite certain regrettable excesses) was basically progressive and democratic. My investigation of the revolutionary process in Spain produced quite different findings, revealing that the Left was not necessarily progressive and certainly not democratic, but in fact during the course of the 1930s produced a regression in Spanish affairs from the relative liberal democracy achieved in 1931-32.
    The Spanish Revolution was brought out in New York by W. W. Norton in 1970 and became my first book to appear inside Spain, thanks to two factors. One was the new press law introduced by Fraga Iribarne four years earlier, which finally began to loosen restrictions on publication; the other was that this book offered a critical perspective on the Left, rather than on the Right, as in the case of the two previous books, so that it might theoretically be more acceptable to the censorship that continued to exist. Even so, there was continuing resistance in official circles to permitting a book of mine to appear within Spain, a resistance only finally vanquished by a vigorous review published by Ricardo de la Cierva, strongly endorsing publication. Without this initiative by La Cierva, the book might not have appeared, despite the eagerness of Alejandro Argullós to publish it in the new series on contemporary Spain presented by Ediciones Ariel. Due to a mistake on the part of the agent in charge of the series, a completely separate Spanish edition was brought out by Argos Vergara five years later, while the Tokyo firm Heibonsha published a Japanese translation in 1974, thanks to a strong recommendation made to them by Joaquín Maurín prior to his death.
    Equally or even more important was the invitation extended by Norman F. Cantor, the imaginative medievalist who served as history editor for Thomas Y. Crowell, to write a full-scale general history of Spain and Portugal. This had not been done in the English-speaking world for a very long while and presented me with a great opportunity, for it was the preparation of this book that gave me a full grasp of the history of the peninsula for the first time. It was nonetheless a daunting undertaking, which occupied me for four years and required a huge amount of reading in the secondary