Franco Sells Spain to America ― Hollywood, Tourism and Public Relations As Postwar Spanish Soft Power

Franco Sells Spain to America is a groundbreaking study of the Franco dictatorship's utilization of Hollywood film production in Spain, American middle-class tourism, and sophisticated public relations programs - including investing $7 million in constructing the most popular national pavilion at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair - in a determined effort to remake the Spanish dictatorship's post-World War II reputation in the US. It provides an entirely new lens for analyzing and understanding the Franco regime's postwar foreign policy priorities with its focus on Spain's reputational outreach to America, which was of central importance.

Drawing on a wealth of new research in American and Spanish archives as well as analysing interviews, films, magazines, newspapers, advertisements and official publications, Neal Rosendorf offers an historically-grounded study of the tools potentially available to a country with a severe reputational deficit to repair.

Neal M. Rosendorf is currently a visiting professor of politics and international relations at New Mexico State University, USA. He holds a PhD in History from Harvard University and has held faculty appointments at Long Island University, the University of Queensland and Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, as well as a research fellowship at USC's Center on Public Diplomacy. He has written numerous articles, book chapters and reviews, and published in such venues as Diplomatic History, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, the International History Review, the Journal of Cold War Studies, The American Interest, and the Foreign Service Journal.