During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Republican newspapers attempted to bridge politically and culturally diverse audiences in defense of an unstable democracy attacked by authoritarian forces. Spain is a complex country home to multiple national identities which claim their own region, language, and way of life, making the theme of Spanish unification tense and conflicting. Using rhetorical framing analysis, with elements of historical discourse analysis and affect theory, this thesis explores the fluid dynamic between political communication and propaganda and the ways both incorporate themes of history, nationalism, and religious faith in Spain. Through analysis of daily coverage in Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona, the three capitals of the Second Spanish Republic, each chapter focuses on a popular periodical of the city and era. Case-studies include Republican ABC (Madrid), El Pueblo (Valencia), and La Vanguardia (Barcelona) as I investigate framing strategies in wartime journalism, the narratives they produced, and the selective emphasis and omission of events in the quest to accomplish mandated messaging objectives. I argue that the impacts of emotion on lived experience help separate the journalist from the historian. Testimonies demonstrate that in the midst of conflict, editors and reporters are susceptible to the same biases and emotions as the general public, resulting in the construction of frames to guide (or distort) the processing of information. I find that national imaginaries are critical to the practice of communicating armed resistance in wartime, moulding frightening realities to specific cultural contexts and locating them within motivational interpretations of the national past. The history of the press is integral to the human search for knowledge and understanding, and it is my hope that the following case-studies of newspapers in the Spanish Civil War will contribute new insights into the role and function of news media in times of crisis.