Editing Homage to Catalonia (section)

===Historiographical evaluation (1970s–present)===
When histories of the civil war first started to be published, historians generally disregarded ''Homage'' as a [[primary source]]. In his 1962 book ''[[The Spanish Civil War (book)|The Spanish Civil War]]'', English historian [[Hugh Thomas, Baron Thomas of Swynnerton|Hugh Thomas]] wrote that, while he thought ''Homage'' was a well-written memoir that was "perceptive about war", he also considered it to be misleading about the events of the war.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=309}} He thought that Orwell had misjudged the war by believing that revolutionary idealism alone was capable of achieving victory; Thomas himself believed that the only way that the Republic could have won the war was through a process of [[centralisation]] and [[militarisation]], backed by the [[Soviet Union]].{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=310}} Tom Buchanan himself disputed Thomas' assessment that ''Homage'' was "misleading" on the war, so long as it was not considered a description of the conflict as a whole.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=310}} [[Paul Preston]] likewise cautioned against taking the book as an "overview of the civil war, which it is not".{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=310}} In contrast, ''Homage'' has also contributed to a historiographical trend that centred the internal conflict within the Republican faction, exemplified by the work of [[Burnett Bolloten]].{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|pp=310-311}}

A revival of interest in the Spanish Civil War was later ignited by the [[Spanish transition to democracy]] in the 1970s, as a new generation of historians began studying the conflict and Orwell's own account of it, which received increasing amounts of scrutiny over his interpretation of the events.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|pp=312-313}} [[Gabriel Jackson (Hispanist)|Gabriel Jackson]] wrote that Orwell had understood the civil war only as an analogue to the situation in Europe and lacked an understanding of the local political context in Spain.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=313}} [[Michael Seidman]] argued that Orwell's depiction of the "working-class paradise" in Barcelona was questionable, as he had only been accounting for the convinced militants and not the "indifference" of many individual workers.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=313}} [[Helen Graham (historian)|Helen Graham]] pointed out how the internecine conflicts witnessed by Orwell had predated the civil war and Soviet intervention in the conflict, arguing against the "Cold War parable of an alien Stalinism which 'injected' conflict into Spanish Republican politics", although her analysis of the consequences of the May Days ultimately aligned with Orwell's.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=313}} 

In his own analysis of the book's effect on historiography, Tom Buchanan found that research on the conflict had not entirely disqualified ''Homage'', but had instead emphasised it as a "snapshot of a complex political situation" taken by an outsider.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=313}} Although Orwell himself warned readers to be aware of his own biases, mistakes and distortions, even engaging in [[self-deprecation]] over his own lack of knowledge of Spanish history and culture, Buchanan worried that people whose only insight into the conflict was Orwell's book would "receive a very unbalanced picture of the conflict as a whole."{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|p=314}} Buchanan concluded that the "very real danger" presented by the book was that it had been recontextualised, from an individual's personal account, into a book that was seen as representative of the civil war as a whole.{{Sfn|Buchanan|2002|pp=313-314}}