1921–2019
○ Natural causes
An American historian who interpreted the Spanish Republic and Civil War
In 1948 an FBI agent pressed Jackson to inform on his classmates; "I told them that I had not considered that to be any of my business," he recalled.
Gabriel Jackson was an American historian, Hispanist, and journalist who made modern Spanish history his central field. His 1965 book, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, was an early English-language synthesis of the Second Republic and the war, including the conflicts within the Republican camp. Jackson viewed the Republic’s institutional reformers and the PCE’s wartime strategy relatively sympathetically, while treating the POUM and revolutionary left as politically impractical, a position that became one pole in later historiographical debate. McCarthyism delayed his academic career, but he later taught modern European history at UC San Diego and continued writing on Spain after retiring to Barcelona.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1942B.A. in history and literature, Harvard University
- 1942–1946Served in the U.S. Army as an aircraft mechanic, photo interpreter, and cartographer
- 1950M.A. in modern history, Stanford University
- 1952Ph.D. in modern and contemporary history, University of Toulouse
- 1965–1983Professor of modern European history, University of California, San Diego
- 1965–1969Chair of the UC San Diego history department
- 1969–1971Chair of the UC San Diego Faculty Senate
- 1983–2019Professor emeritus and writer on Spanish history
Related historical events
The Negrín Biography and the Defense of Resistance
After retiring in 1983 and settling in Barcelona, Jackson devoted much of the 2000s to a major biography of Juan Negrín, the Republic's prime minister for much of the Civil War. Negrín's insistence on winning the war, his acceptance of Soviet aid, and his refusal to surrender to Franco had earned him the contempt of the right but also of anarchist factions, the revolutionary anti-Stalinist left, and the Largo Caballero and Prieto wings of the divided Socialist Party. Jackson aimed to produce the most balanced and comprehensive account of the man; the book appeared first in Spanish in 2008 and in English in 2010. Its central argument was that the refusal to surrender was justified. He treated Negrín's policy of resistance and constant diplomatic effort as the right one, and called the Western democracies' failure to support the Republic immoral, contrary to international law, and a grave political mistake. Had Britain and France backed the Republic and stood up to Hitler, he argued, history would have taken a different course. The work capped a research agenda begun with his encounters with Republican exiles in Mexico City in 1942. Jackson was the author who helped put twentieth-century Spanish history back on the academic map in the United States, but in Spain he was a public intellectual writing for El País and other outlets, and a long-time ALBA board member.