Uncivil Guard

Foster Chamberlin is an assistant teaching professor of modern European history at Northern Arizona University.

"This engaging and well-researched book offers a fascinating and pathbreaking account of one of the most important-and frequently feared-institutions in modern Spanish history. Foster Chamberlin shows how and why the Civil Guard clung to an outdated sense of honor even as it led to increasingly violent behavior." - Geoffrey Jensen, author of Irrational Triumph: Cultural Despair, Military Nationalism, and the Ideological Origins of Franco's Spain "Chamberlin's detailed archival work illuminates how both the Spanish Civil Guard's nineteenth-century organizational structure and its cultural milieu, which syncretized police and military values, were maladaptive when faced with the rise of mass politics and increasing democratization in twentieth-century Spain." - Sandie Holguin, author of Flamenco Nation: The Construction of Spanish National Identity "This remarkable book focuses on the violence used by the Civil Guard in the Spanish Civil War not as simply a product of that conflict, but as the result of a militarized, conservative political culture that grew over the long history of the institution." - David A. Messenger, author of Hunting Nazis in Franco's Spain