Historias: The Spanish History Podcast: Recent Episodes
Historias Podcast
Historias is a Iberian history podcast. Each monthly episode is an interview with a historian on a particular topic in Spanish and Iberian history.
El movimiento anarquista es uno de los fenómenos más importantes en la historia contemporánea de España, pero fue prohibido entre 1871 y 1881. Pero ya legal, en 1882-83, fue acusado falsamente de ser una organización terrorista, conocida como la Mano Negra. En este episodio, la profesora Clara Lida habla de cómo los anarquistas sobrevivieron los largos años de persecución, gracias a diversos mecanismos de movilización y vínculos transnacionales. Concluimos con una discusión de los conceptos de anarco-comunismo y propaganda por el hecho.
Political violence during Spain's Second Republic period (1931-1936) was one of the primary causes of the Spanish Civil War. What was the role of Spain's largest militarized police force, the Civil Guard, in this violence? In this episode, Historias host Bretton Rodriguez interviews Historias host Foster Chamberlin about his new book Uncivil Guard: Policing, Military Culture, and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War to find out. They explore the origins of the organizational culture of the Civil Guard going back to the mid-19th century, the relations between civil guards and local townspeople, incidents of political violence involving the Civil Guard during the Second Republic, and the role of the Asturias rebellion of 1934 in shifting civil guards' attitudes towards the public.
In this episode, Kathryn Mahaney, author of Feminism, National Identity, and European Integration in Modern Spain: Defining a Democracy, 1960-Present, offers insights on over 60 years of feminist history in Spain from the late Franco regime to the present day. How did the movement emerge from its secret origins during the Franco regime, what were the achievements of and divisions within the movement during the Transition to democracy, and what are the greatest challenges facing the movement today? These are some of the questions that Mahaney addresses as we discuss one of the most central and contested social movements defining Spanish society today.
In this episode, Cacey Bowen Farnsworth, author of Atlantic Crossroads in Lisbon's New Golden Age, 1668-1750, gives us a tour of Lisbon's streets during Portugal's second golden age in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when the city was flush with gold and other wealth from Brazil. From black brotherhoods to English merchants to the Inquisition, Farnsworth provides a portrait of the city as an Atlantic entrepôt before the Great Earthquake of 1755.
Spain was perhaps the world’s greatest imperial power in the early-modern period, but few know about the new imperial ventures it attempted in the 19th century. In this episode, Scott Eastman, author of A Missionary Nation: Race, Religion, and Spain’s Age of Liberal Imperialism, 1841-1881, crisscrosses the Atlantic world to tell of these ventures in Morocco, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and West Africa. Along the way, he unpacks Spanish liberals’ views on race and religion within the context of the second wave of European imperialism in the 19th century.
The dresses worn by members of Spain’s royal family are indelible features of Diego Velázquez’s famous paintings, but what is the story of the creation of these remarkable fashions? In this episode, Prof. Amanda Wunder, author of Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV, tells us the story of Mateo Aguado, the tailor for the queens of King Philip IV’s court and the artisan behind many of the striking fashions of Spain’s Golden Age. We discuss many aspects of Aguado’s life and career, including the process of royal dressmaking and the evolving political implications of his creations.
Several thousand Spaniards were imprisoned in the notorious Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen. While there are many memoirs from survivors of the camp, only one published his account just a year after liberation, Carlos Rodríguez del Risco. In this episode, Prof. Sara J. Brenneis, who has just released a critical edition of this forgotten account, returns to the podcast to share Rodríguez del Risco’s unique and incredible story of how he went from Civil War fighter to exile in France to concentration camp survivor to Francoist. She also discusses how she rediscovered this important memoir and dealt in the critical edition with its more problematic aspects.
El Camino de Santiago is a historic pilgrimage route, a long-distance hiking trek and one of Spain's most iconic tourist attractions all at the same time. In this episode, Beatriz Gomez Acuña, a professor at Elmhurst University and a veteran of the camino, discusses the history behind these routes to Santiago de Compostela as well as the challenges and rewards of walking the camino in the modern era of mass tourism.
Como parte de nuestra serie Historias para BSPHS, en este episodio hablamos con el prof. Javier Moreno Luzón sobre la vida política del rey Alfonso XIII, el último rey de la época de la Restauración. Moreno Luzón lo presenta desde la perspectiva de la historia cultural de la política y discutimos diferentes influencias en su visión política, como la Iglesia y el Ejército, así como su papel en el colapso del sistema de la Restauración y en la dictadura de Primo de Rivera. En todo esto, abordamos algunos de los temas más importantes de la época como el nacionalismo, el regeneracionismo y el papel del monarca europeo en el siglo XX.
In this episode, Patricia Schechter, a professor of history at Portland State University, joins the podcast to discuss the history of Pueblonuevo del Terrible, a rough-and-tumble mining town in Spain’s Córdoba Province. Starting with an overview of the landscape of the town and the story of its unusual name, Schechter then traces the history of its struggles to obtain recognition and build a sense of place from the 1880s through the end of the Spanish Civil War. Along the way, we touch on themes of the period as wide ranging as place, global capitalism, labor, religion and the state.
En este episodio, como parte de nuestra serie sobre los nazis en España, hablamos precisamente de este tema con José Luis Rodríguez Jiménez, catedrático de historia contemporánea en la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos y autor del nuevo libro Bajo el manto del caudillo: Nazis, fascistas y colaboracionistas en la España franquista. Consideramos por qué nazis de varios países huyeron a España después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y cuál fue la política del gobierno franquista respeto a ellos. En la segunda parte, nos concentramos en la figura de Léon Degrelle, destacado colaborador nazi de Bélgica, discutiendo cómo llegó a España y cómo vivió una vida de comodidad inesperada allí.
Spanish football (soccer) teams like FC Barcelona and Real Madrid have become household names around the world. But how did Spanish sport become a global phenomenon? In this episode, Andrew McFarland, a professor of history at Indiana University Kokomo, explores the origins of sport as mass entertainment in Spain, from the influence of English footballers to the question of bullfighting as a modern sport. He also links these developments to political and intellectual trends of the time like regenerationism. Finally, we look at the origins of a few of Spain’s most popular football clubs, and even hear about a couple of McFarland’s own favorites.
Whether Rioja, Ribera del Duero or Albariño, Spanish wine has become a major component of the country's image internationally, but this wasn't always the case. In this episode, Karl Trybus, a professor of history at Limestone University, traces the history behind Spain's wines from the nineteenth century to the present day, including the the effects of the oidium and phylloxera epidemics in the country and Spain's efforts to promote its wines abroad, with a special emphasis on its unique sherry and cava wines. Trybus even treats us to a few recommendations of some of his personal favorites to try.
Cuando en los años ochenta los capos colombianos buscaban ampliar su negocio más allá del continente americano e introducirse en el mercado europeo, en los gallegos encontraron los perfectos socios para trasportar la cocaína, no solo por su condición de marineros innatos, sino también por su experiencia en el contrabando y, sobre todo, por su discreción. En este episodio con Sabrina Laroussi, profesora titular de estudios hispánicos en el Instituto Militar de Virginia, hablamos del origen del tráfico de drogas en el noroeste de España y cómo se fraguó la colaboración entre los cárteles colombianos de Medellín y Cali y los clanes amateurs gallegos. En este contexto, no podemos dejar de hablar de la narcocultura y sus manifestaciones en la televisión, las plataformas digitales de streaming, el cine, y la literatura.
In this episode, we begin by discussing the origins of the Crown of Aragon. Then, we transition into a conversation about the role and treatment of religious minorities in the Late Middle Ages not only in the Crown of Aragon, but across medieval Europe more broadly. Within this broad topic, we focus on the role of royal processions and what they can tell us about religious minorities and their place within medieval societies. Finally, we explore some of the sources, archives, and techniques that historians use to engage with the past, and we hypothesize about where the field might go in the future.
As part of our continuing series on Spain and Morocco, in this episode Eric Calderwood returns to the podcast to discuss his new book On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus and the many ways in which the idea of al-Andalus, the medieval period of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula, has been taken up by groups as varied as Arabs, Berber/Amazigh people, feminists and Palestinians. In the second half of the podcast, we'll listen to clips from three musical works that illustrate how musicians have also been inspired by al-Andalus to imagine various connections across time and space.
In this second part of our two-part series on Equatorial Guinea, we're joined by Michael Ugarte and Benita Sampedro Vizcaya to take a look at the literature of this West African nation, considering everything from European travel writers to European settlers, authors from Equatorial Guinea, and women writers. We pay special attention to the subject of exilic writing and highlight a few of the country's most well-known authors along the way, including Donato Ndongo Bidyogo and María Nsué Angüe.
In this episode, we explore the development of Jewish identities during the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. Amongst other topics, we discuss the origins of Jewish communities in Europe, the creation and impact of Judeoconversos in medieval Iberia, and the development of a unique Jewish civilization and identity during the Early Modern Period.
In this episode, we explore the development of Jewish identities during the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. Amongst other topics, we discuss the origins of Jewish communities in Europe, the creation and impact of Judeoconversos in medieval Iberia, and the development of a unique Jewish civilization and identity during the Early Modern Period.
Como parte de nuestra serie sobre España en África, en este primer episodio de dos episodios bilingües sobre Guinea Ecuatorial, hablamos con el profesor Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida sobre la colonización española en Guinea Ecuatorial. Empezamos con una revista de la geografía y la economía del país y de la historia de los principios de su colonización por varios poderes europeos. A continuación, examinamos los métodos de control colonial utilizados durante la dictadura franquista, el proceso de independencia y la formación de un nuevo régimen dictatorial allí bajo Francisco Macías Nguema.
In this second part of our series on slavery in Spain's colonies in North Africa, we speak with Ali Al Tuma about slavery in the Spanish Sahara. Al Tuma provides an overview of how slavery formed part of the social and economic structures in the Sahara and discusses the Spanish colonial policy towards slavery. He then shares some of the stories he has uncovered of slaves who navigated this complex and dangerous web of owners, traffickers, soldiers and policemen in search of a better life.
En este primero de dos episodios sobre la esclavitud en las colonias españolas en África, hablamos con el profesor Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste sobre la esclavitud en el protectorado español de Marruecos, enfocándonos en Tetuán, el capital. Discutimos las diferencias entre la esclavitud en el mundo árabe y en las Américas, la vida diaria de estas personas esclavizadas en Tetuán y su cultura única. Además, charleamos sobre los esfuerzos del profesor Mateo Dieste para recuperar la memoria de las esclavas domésticas (las tatas) de Tetuán, y incluso escucharemos a un poco de música de la tradición gnawa.
As part of our Historias for BSPHS series, in this episode we interview Katie Harris and Pamela Radcliff, the editors of a new special issue of the Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies entitled New Currents in Iberian History, about the divisions that they noticed in the field of Iberian history when editing this issue and how recent work is attempting to bridge these gaps. We’ll explore the temporal and spatial boundaries within the field as well as the innovative new approaches that historians are taking to studying questions of race and gender in particular in the Iberian Peninsula and beyond.
From streaming music to Tictok videos to podcasts, recorded sound is ubiquitous in our lives, but few of us give much thought to how it all started. In this episode, we’re joined by Eva Moreda Rodríguez, a reader in music at the University of Glasgow, to do just that. We follow the origins of the recording all the way back to Edison’s first phonograph, tracing its path in Spain through scientific demonstrations, traveling fairs and early recording studios. Along the way, we’ll have a chance to listen to some of these early recordings and discuss both the reactions people had to them at the time and our impressions of them today.
In this episode, we discuss the importance of the Biblical story of Cain and Abel on medieval Spanish literature. This story was told and retold throughout the ancient in medieval worlds. In medieval Iberia, it formed an important backdrop to the composition of historical narratives and often served as a model for their accounts of disputes between kings and members of the royal family.
Along with our exploration of the story of Cain and Abel, we will also explore some of the ways that digital tools can help us to better understand and think about some of the big topics in the study of medieval Iberia. In particular, we will discuss Dr. Peña Fernández’s new digital project focusing on Alfonso X’s General estoria and some of the new insights offered by the project.
Any visitor to Spain today will be familiar with the Cortes Inglés department store as the anchor of Spanish commercial cityscape. But how did department stores take hold in Spain and what there the political implications of their rise? In this episode, Alejandro Gómez del Moral tells their story in the context of Spain’s turbulent early-twentieth century and long Francoist dictatorship. In Part II, we discuss to what extent the rise of consumer culture contributed to the undermining of the dictatorial regime.
Any visitor to Spain today will be familiar with the Cortes Inglés department store as the anchor of Spanish commercial cityscape. But how did department stores take hold in Spain and what there the political implications of their rise? In this episode, Alejandro Gómez del Moral tells their story in the context of Spain’s turbulent early-twentieth century and long Francoist dictatorship. In Part I, we examine how department stores thrived even within the restrictive culture of the dictatorship.
Between the removal of Franco’s remains from the Valley of the Fallen and the new Law of Democratic Memory, the legacies of Spain’s recent past have been in the news a lot recently. But how much of the Franco dictatorship survives in Spanish politics and society today and in what forms? How can those hold overs be addressed? In Part II of this episode, Sebastiaan Faber discusses ideas about historical memory and how to address Franco’s legacies in Spain in a transnational context.
Between the removal of Franco’s remains from the Valley of the Fallen and the new Law of Democratic Memory, the legacies of Spain’s recent past have been in the news a lot recently. But how much of the Franco dictatorship survives in Spanish politics and society today and in what forms? How can those hold overs be addressed? In Part I of this episode, Prof. Sebastiaan Faber of Oberlin explores the legacies of Francoism in Spanish business, courts, politics and more.
In this episode, we discuss the intersection of chivalry and violence with Dr. Sam Claussen, with a focus on the chaotic Trastámara period of Castilian history (1369-1516). In examining chivalry, we find ourselves immersed in the bloody history of late medieval knights, grappling to understand the purposes of chivalric violence, their meanings and consequences. The destruction wrought by knights and nobles in late medieval Castile was closely tied to the ideas broadcast in chivalric writings and helped shape the course of Castile as it approached the early modern world and stood on the precipice of a European and global empire.
Although it declared an end to its armed activities in 2011, ETA remains one of the most controversial phenomena in the historical memory of Spain’s recent past. Often missing from these debates is discussion of the lives of ETA members themselves, who are usually portrayed as either terrorists or freedom fighters. In this episode, Nicolás Buckley traces the rise and fall of ETA, as seen through the eyes of seven ETA activists he interviewed. Along the way, we discuss such topics as their motivations, the violence they experienced from the Spanish state and their experiences in prison. We also touch on larger questions such as Spain’s democratization process, Spanish and Basque identity, the line between victims and perpetrators, and oral history methodology.
In this episode of Historias, we discuss the origins of the Crown of Aragon, the rise of James I as a conqueror, and his impact on the legal system not only within his kingdom, but throughout medieval Iberia. In particular, we explore the impact of the Vidal Mayor—the law code composed during his rule by Vidal de Canellas—within the Crown of Aragon with particular attention on how the law code helped determine the redistribution of land in Valencia following its conquest. With Belen Vicens.
In this episode, we first discuss the development of different vernaculars as literary languages during the Middle Ages. Then, we look at Petrarch and his influence on contemporary and later medieval authors. Finally, we discuss some of the ways that Petrarch’s ideas about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance not only influenced his contemporaries, but may have also helped to shape modern conceptions of the period as well as the development of “Medievalism” in popular culture. With Leonardo Francalanci.
Sasha D. Pack, a professor of history at SUNY Buffalo and author of the recent book The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Modern Hispano-African Borderland, traces the rise and fall of the Gibraltar borderland through examining some of the colorful characters and political intrigues that defined it. After getting a sense of the complicated political status of the region, we discuss tourism in the international city of Tangier and look at some examples of “slipstream potentates,” from a Moroccan bandit to a Spanish gangster.
Drawing on an interdisciplinary corpus that includes historical accounts, literary texts, legal treatises, and maps, Professor Mariana-Cecilia Velázquez joins the podcast to discuss the visual and narrative representations of the colorful and politically shrewd English Captain Francis Drake, who serves as a case study to understand the wide spectrum of the usages of the terms “pirate” and “corsair” as well as the relation between the image of the pirate and larger concepts such as property, sovereignty, and power. The conversation also explores topics related to the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean and specific individuals, such as Miguel Enríquez, who operated at the margins of the Spanish Iberian empire.
Drawing on an interdisciplinary corpus that includes historical accounts, literary texts, legal treatises, and maps, Professor Mariana-Cecilia Velázquez joins the podcast to discuss the visual and narrative representations of the colorful and politically shrewd English Captain Francis Drake, who serves as a case study to understand the wide spectrum of the usages of the terms “pirate” and “corsair” as well as the relation between the image of the pirate and larger concepts such as property, sovereignty, and power. The conversation also explores topics related to the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean and specific individuals, such as Miguel Enríquez, who operated at the margins of the Spanish Iberian empire.
Despite being abolished decades earlier by some other European countries, the slave trade continued to the Spanish colony of Cuba until the mid-19th century. Yet efforts to end the trade in the Spanish Empire also have a long history influenced by the particularities of Spain’s political and economic situation. In this episode, Jesús Sanjurjo traces this history from the beginning of the 19th century, considering the influence of British diplomacy, liberal ideology and colonial economic conditions on the process.
Francisco Franco ruled Spain as dictator for almost 40 years from 1939-1975. He is thus one of modern European history’s most important, and most controversial, figures, and his long life spanned periods of colonial conflict, civil war, world war and post-war economic growth. Prof. Stanley Payne joins the podcast to discuss some of the insights he offers on Franco’s life and times in his recent biography of the dictator. Drawing on sources from Franco’s personal archive and interviews with family members, Payne weighs in on some of the debates surrounding the dictator such as how good of a general he was, how close he came to joining World War II and how much of a role he had in the rapid changes that took place in Spanish society late in his life.
In 1901, news that two women had married in the region of Galicia in Northwestern Spain made national headlines and still surprises us today. How did this “marriage without a man,” as it was known, occur and what was the reaction to it in the regional and national press? Profs. Joyce Tolliver and Sean McDaniel discuss what we can learn from this unusual case about passing, gender and being in early twentieth-century Spain.
As the 2020 Summer Olympics, postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, take place in Tokyo, we take a look at another Olympics planned under difficult circumstances, one that was never able to take place. The July 1936 Popular Olympics were planned to take place in Barcelona as a counter to the games held in Nazi Germany that year, but the Spanish Civil War broke out the day before the games were scheduled to begin. In this episode, James Stout, an investigative journalist with a PhD in modern European history and the author of the recent book The Popular Front and the Barcelona 1936 Popular Olympics: Playing as if the World Was Watching, joins us to tell the amazing story of these games and anti-fascist athletes involved.
In 1542, Spanish explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo’s galleon San Salvador sailed into San Diego Bay. In 2015, 473 years later, the San Diego Maritime Museum christened a reconstruction of the ship in the same harbor. How was a ship that sailed almost 500 years ago rebuilt in today’s world? In this episode, Prof. Carla Rahn Phillips, chair of the project’s historical design committee and an expert in early-modern Spanish maritime history, takes us through the amazing story of the project from historical research to naval design to construction, complete with anecdotes from her own experiences lending a hand in the building of the ship.
Flamenco is one of the most iconic symbols of Spain, but how did that come to be and how was flamenco perceived inside of Spain? Those are the questions Prof. Sandie Holguín considers in this episode through listening to several selections of flamenco music by Manolo Caracol, La Niña de los Peines and Enrique Morente. In so doing, we’ll discuss the origins of flamenco, how it was received by foreign travelers and how Spanish and regional nationalist thinkers reacted to it throughout modern Spanish history. This episode is part of our Historias for BSPHS collaboration, as a review Holguín’s book Flamenco Nation: The Construction of Spanish National Identity by Alejandro Quiroga appears in the latest issue of the Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies.
The first episode of our new “Historias for BSPHS” collaboration with the Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Studies, in this roundtable three scholars studying Spain tell their stories of facing and overcoming the difficulties of doing research during the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the journal’s ongoing forum on Doing Iberian Studies in Times of Crisis. Sara J. Brenneis tells of finding new sources when the pandemic suddenly shut down Spain’s archives, James D. Fernández of confronting the cancellation of his exhibition and study abroad program and Charles Nicholas Saenz of finding new directions after not being able to travel to Spain. The guests also discuss what lessons the experience of navigating the shutdown gave them and suggest what scholars might learn about conducting research from the challenges of the current moment.
The Revolution of October 1934 in Asturias is the most famous episode of Spain’s Second Republic period, but it is more often the subject of legend and propaganda than historical study. In this episode, Matthew Kerry, a lecturer at the University of Stirling and the author of the recent book Unite, Proletarian Brothers!: Radicalism and Revolution in the Spanish Second Republic, discusses the history of the local mining communities behind the uprising and how they radicalized within the turbulent context of the 1930s in Europe. In so doing, he considers larger questions about the nature of ideas like community, radicalism and revolution.
King Philip II of Spain (r. 1556-1598) inherited the first truly global empire. But what kept a set of kingdoms that included Castile, Aragón, vast swaths of North and South America, Portugal, the Low Countries, Italian territories, and the Philippines from falling apart? Prof. Max Deardorff explores the legal underpinnings of this complicated system, including the early modern conception of the “republic,” the relationship between early modern vassals and the Crown, and the question of whether native subjects could ever hope to achieve enfranchisement in colonial cities founded by Spaniards. Deardorff highlights the importance of the Council of Trent, which conditioned a generation of Spanish Catholic reform and played a crucial role in defining early modern citizenship, and points out how royal strategies for integrating Moriscos (Andalusi converts from Islam and their descendants) into Christian society in recently-conquered Granada provided a blueprint for assimilating native subjects in the Americas.
Thousands of Moroccans fought on the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War, but few know what the experience was like for these men beyond propagandistic stereotypes. Ali Al Tuma, one of the last researchers to be able to interview Moroccan veterans, discusses what he learned about why they joined and what their experiences were. We also consider the Spanish perceptions of these Moroccan soldiers on both sides of the conflict and the accusations of atrocities leveled against them.
With a father who went from communist to fascist, a mother who lived life as a romantic novel and sons who alternated between madness and genius, the Paneros were a family of poets for whom melodrama was a way of life. A 1976 documentary about the family became a surprise hit that seemed to strike a chord in wake of Franco’s death. Journalist Aaron Shulman joins the program to tell this family’s fascinating story and to discuss what it can reveal about legacies left by the tragic years of civil war and dictatorship in Spain.
Medieval Muslim Iberia, known as al-Andalus, and Morocco have connections dating back centuries, but how did al-Andalus shape debates about national identity in modern Spain and Morocco? Prof. Eric Calderwood finds answers in the Spanish colonial project in Morocco beginning in the 19th century. Bringing together the seemingly unrelated threads of Spanish propaganda during the Hispano-Moroccan War, regional nationalist ideas and the Franco regime’s efforts to win support in Morocco, Calderwood tells a fascinating story of unexpected consequences that culminates in Moroccan nationalists taking up ideas originating with Spanish colonizers.
Don Juan Manuel was one of the most important literary figures of medieval Castile, and texts that he produced were foundational in the development of Spanish literature. They also reflected – and supported – his ideas about society, power, and nobility. In this episode, Dr. Mario Cossío Olavide discusses the nature and impact of Don Juan Manuel’s work. In particular, he explores connections between Don Juan Manuel’s literary work and his political ambitions, offers a new perspective on his representation of Islam and Islamic rulers, and also briefly discusses the later transmission and reception of his work throughout the Iberian Peninsula and beyond.
The idea of the child was central to the regenerationist thinking that swept Spain in the wake of the country’s defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Professor Anna Kathryn Kendrick, author of Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain, explores the philosophical origins of early 20th-century calls for educational reform in Catholicism, holism and the emerging field of psychology. We’ll also take a look at the interest that Spain’s avant garde artists of the time had in children, with Kendrick reading and analyzing excerpts from the poetry of Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén and Josefina de la Torre.
In 1453 CE, the Ottoman Empire conquered the city of Constantinople and destroyed the last vestiges of an empire that had existed for over a thousand years. The event sent shockwaves throughout Europe, and contemporary writers were forced to think about Constantinople – and its symbolic importance within European identity and culture – in new and innovative ways. In Spain, individual authors built upon a long tradition of using representations of the "East" as a space to construct identity and beliefs. In this episode, Dr. David Reher discusses the importance of the cities of Constantinople and Troy in both the medieval and early modern Spanish imaginations, and he explores how later accounts were shaped by the conquest of Constantinople and the growth of the Ottoman Empire.
To this day, thousands of mass graves in towns and the countryside across Spain constitute a grim legacy of the country’s infamous Civil War. Yet these graves themselves have their own politically fraught history as old as the war itself, and they now constitute the most important focal point of Spain’s ongoing debate about how the war should be remembered. In this episode, Dr. Wendy Perla Kurtz traces this history and describes recent efforts to exhume these graves and give the war’s victims a proper burial. She also discusses her own efforts to contribute to the historical memory through her online project, entitled Virtual Cartographies, which is an interactive digital map of all the mass grave sites in Spain where users can access multimedia documentation of commemorations that have taken place at each site.
Prof. Miriam Shadis of Ohio University joins us to explore the powerful roles that queens had in medieval Portugal, including in territorial matters, claims of legitimacy, patronage, military affairs and diplomacy. Beginning with the very founding of the Kingdom of Portugal, Shadis finds that in Portugal the title of queen was not reserved solely for the wife of the king but was also bestowed on other royal women who had political power such as the sisters of the monarch. Shadis considers why the royal women of Portugal had this unique status and how that status changed over the course of the 12th and 13th centuries.
Spain’s own genre of music theater, zarzuela, is one of the country’s most distinctive cultural forms. In this episode, Prof. Clinton Young traces the evolution of the genre in the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Spanish history, linking it to the development of the urban middle and working classes. We will listen to selections from several famous zarzuelas along the way, with Young analyzing how zarzuela contributed to Spain’s unique bottom-up nationalization process. Please see the episode webpage for a list of the selections.
The idea of democracy is central to Spanish political culture today, even as the question of exactly what form democracy should take is still highly contested. When did the notion of democracy first enter the Spanish political imagination and how did the idea evolve over time? In this episode, Professor Florencia Peyrou traces the development of Spanish democrats’ political thinking from the mid-nineteenth century through the chaotic Sexenio Revolucionario period (1868-1874) and beyond. Throughout, she presents democracy as a fluid concept that has had multiple meanings throughout the decades as democrats of all stripes navigated the insurrections, coups, riots and conspiracies of mid-nineteenth century Spain.
The usual interpretation of recent Spain history has been that the country was inoculated against the return of the radical right seen in other European countries because of the memory of the Franco dictatorship. However, the rise of Vox and other far right parties in Spain in the last couple of years has called this interpretation into question. Why are these groups gaining strength in Spain now and what links do they have with Spain’s experience with fascism under the Franco regime? In this episode, Professor Louie Dean Valencia-García puts the recent headlines about the return of the radical right to Spain in historical context and considers how new this resurgent far right really is.
Since at least the 19th century, Badajoz Province was the classic example of Spain’s most grievous ills: a harsh landscape where poverty, unemployment and landlessness were endemic. Dave Henderson traces the failed efforts of successive governments to tackle these problems and then explains how the Franco regime sought to take a different approach centered on irrigation, social regulation and land grants to politically reliable farmers. Did the Francoist plan transform the landscape and society of Spain’s poorest region? Henderson argues that it did, but in a manner far different from what government planners had envisioned.
Antonio José Martínez Palacios was one of the most promising composers of early twentieth-century Spain. From his humble beginnings as a musical prodigy from the provincial capital of Burgos, the composer (known as Antonio José) won praise for his choral works and orchestral pieces, drawing inspiration from his native Castile. But as a proponent of education and Republican values in a deeply conservative town, Antonio José was murdered by a Falange militia at the beginning of the Civil War in an execution that has been compared to that of poet Federico García Lorca. For some 40 years, the Franco regime banned performances of Antonio José’s music, but his oeuvre has been rediscovered in recent decades. In this episode, Robert Long, a musician and a professor of history at Elgin Community College, traces the life, death, silencing and recuperation of this composer through listening to and analyzing several selections of Antonio José’s music. We begin with the second movement (Balada: Lento y apasionado) of his Suite ingenua (1928).
The SS commando Otto Skorzeny was the most notorious Nazi to hid out in Spain after the Second World War. Yet, far from staying hidden, Skorzeny made frequent appearances in the Spanish media through the Franco period. In this episode, part of our series on Nazis in Spain, Prof. Joshua Goode of Claremont Graduate University explores how Skorzeny was able to reinvent himself to stay in the public eye as the Franco regime evolved. In so doing, Goode challenges the view that after the World War II the Franco regime always hid its previous connections to the Nazis. He also considers how the Francoist portrayal of Nazism shaped Spain’s incomplete confrontation with the Holocaust in recent decades.
This month, Daniel Hershenzon, author of The Captive Sea: Slavery, Commerce, and Communication in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean, discusses slavery and ransoming practices on both the Christian and Muslim sides of the early modern Mediterranean, focusing on the seventeenth century. Hershenzon presents Mediterranean slavery as creating an unintentional system of communication and economic exchange across geographical, political and religious boundaries. In this episode, we explore how friars, merchants, family members and rulers all participated in the ransoming process and consider one particularly complex case of prisoner exchange negotiations as an example of how the ransoming system worked.
Between 1940 and 1945, some 7,200 Spanish Republican exiles were held captive in Nazi Germany’s notorious Mauthausen concentration camp. In this episode, part of our series on the Nazis and Spain, Sara J. Brenneis, author of Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015, discusses examples of how the Spanish in Mauthausen were remembered in Spain, from the time of the Franco regime up until today. In each case, from prisoners who clandestinely kept records from inside the camp to accounts that made it past the censorship of the Franco years to recent works of “postmemory” such as a graphic novel and a twitter feed, Brenneis considers how historical context can shape the memory of this Spanish encounter with the horrors of the Nazi regime.
Immediately following the Spanish Civil War, Spain faced a terrible food crisis. Suzanne Dunai examines how the policies of the early Franco dictatorship brought on this crisis and how ordinary Spaniards, particularly women, dealt with it on a day-to-day basis. From ration cards to bartering, from canning to buying on the black market, Spanish women showed a remarkable resilience as they sought to feed their families in this time of devastating scarcity.
Like most other Europeans, the Basques of southern France had to endure a puppet government and Nazi occupation during the Second World War. What was it like to live under occupation? How did Basque culture influence the ways in which French Basques both collaborated with and resisted the Germans? For the third part of our series on the Nazis in Iberian history, Professor Sandra Ott takes an ethnographic approach to answering these questions, using the stories of individuals and families to reveal just how complex and difficult different individuals’ strategies for living under occupation could be. Danger, duplicity and revenge are all themes in these real-life tales fit for a spy novel.
Even as the enslavement of black Africans became widespread in the Atlantic World and modern racism was developing, the veneration of black saints was also on the rise in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. In this episode, Professor Erin Rowe discusses who these saints were and who venerated them. We consider how hagiographers argued that these holy people of African descent could be saintly at a time when many questioned the ability of non-whites to be fully Christian. We also examine how the sculptures of these saints celebrate their blackness as part of their spirituality, suggesting that even in this period of slavery, ideas and discourses about race were far from homogeneous.
The bombing of the Basque town of Gernika on April 26, 1937 by the planes of Germany’s Condor Legion, fighting for Franco’s rebel forces during the Spanish Civil War, today stands in the historical memory as one of our most powerful reminders of the horrors of war, thanks in no small part to Picasso’s famous painting. But what were the Germans trying to accomplish in this terror bombing, how exactly did the events of that day unfold and did the Germans achieve their goals? In this second part of our series on Nazis in Spain, Xabier Irujo, Director of the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada- Reno, answers these questions as well as addresses the aftereffects of an event that we still remember with horror more than 80 years later.
In this episode, guest A. Katie Harris delves into the elite but also secretive world of relic collecting in the in the early modern Mediterranean. She describes the at-times nefarious practices of relic dealers and thieves and grave robbers, and considers to what extent relics can be viewed as commodities in a market even though the Church prohibited their sale. We then turn to the bizarre story of the theft of the remains of San Juan de Mata in 1655 by Trinitarian monks and discuss what the complicated saga of these bones reveals about the changing way in which sacred material objects were understood in the early modern world.
This episode focuses on two recent Spanish-language films that comment on the Spanish Civil War, the Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy: Devil’s Backbone (El espinazo del diablo) by Guillermo del Toro and Bad Education (Mala Educación) by Pedro Almodóvar. Interestingly, both films feature abused children, boarding schools for boys, strongly masculine but corrupted male characters and few female characters. How do these filmmakers’ efforts to comment on Spain’s recent past lead them to so many similar themes? What do these films reveal about not only the trauma of war and dictatorship but also Spain’s collective memories of the past? Jessica Davidson, an associate professor at James Madison University, will consider these questions as she analyzes these two disturbing but also thought-provoking films. While it is not necessary to do so, listeners will benefit from having watched the films in advance, and there are a few spoilers.
We might associate the sociolinguistic ideas of codeswitching and diglossia more with our own globalized world than with the Middle Ages, but Professor Antonio Zaldívar argues that these practices could have powerful connotations as the kings of Aragon struggled to increase their authority over the nobility in the 13th century. In discussing how these kings began to use the vernacular in responding to noble defiance letters and in requests for support, Zaldívar explores the development modern governing structures and official written communications.
UC San Diego Professor Pamela Radcliff has recently published a new history of modern Spain entitled Modern Spain: 1808 to the Present. In this episode, we discuss the challenges overcome and insights gained from this project, starting with how Radcliff developed a new framework for the history of modern Spain that neither told a narrative of failure nor presented a revisionist story that ignored the darker sides of the modernization process. Instead, she explains how she provides a history of Spanish “modernity with all its warts” even as she navigates the politically polarized historiographies of the Second Republic and Civil War periods and concludes by grappling with the current situation in Catalonia, for instance. In short, the episode provides a behind-the-scenes look at the development of a book that is sure to prove a new foundation for students and scholars of modern Spain.
When the French invaded Spain in 1808 and imprisoned the royal family, the country was thrown into chaos, with local councils, or juntas, taking governance into their own hands. Charles Nicholas Saenz discusses how these groups sought to establish supremacy, authority and legitimacy in this unprecedented situation. Even as their elite memberships sought to prevent revolution from spreading to Spain, they created new governing structures that could never be erased. They unwittingly brought Spain into the modern period while making the local an indelible force in Spanish political culture.
At the end of the Second World War, hundreds of Nazi spies remained in Spain, and the Allies feared those agents could keep Nazism alive under the Franco dictatorship. In this episode, Professor David Messenger traces the allied effort to repatriate men to Germany for denazification. How successful was the repatriation program? What was the fate of the Germans who were deported? Messenger considers these questions before concluding with the implications of his work on the repatriation program for our understanding of both the Franco regime and postwar Europe more broadly.
An association between horses and the medieval nobility is built into the Spanish language itself, and horses are frequently cited as a key factor in Spain’s conquest of the Americas. Yet what exactly was the role of the horse in Spanish warfare and society, and how did that role change over time? Kathryn Renton examines these questions in this episode of Historias, from the efforts the medieval Castilian kings to encourage horse ownership to the role of the horse not only in the American conquests but also in the European wars of the early-modern period. One common thread is clear among these wide-ranging topics: more than a military tool, the horse’s true importance lay in its role as a contested social symbol.
La economía tuvo un peso muy importante en la vida política y social de la Segunda República. La gran crisis económica derivada del Crack de 1929, se unió a otra de carácter interno en el caso español. Donde la política de obras públicas iniciada durante el Régimen de Primo de Rivera vació las arcas del estado, disparando la deuda pública. A la caída de la demanda pública, se le unió la de carácter privado como consecuencia de la falta de confianza que el capital tenía en las reformas que el nuevo gobierno quería emprender. En este sentido surgen diversas preguntas: ¿Cómo respondieron las administraciones estatales, regionales y locales ante esta situación? ¿Tenían sus medidas vínculos internacionales? Iñaki Etxaniz Tesouro intenta responder a estas preguntas, centrado en el caso del País Vasco, una de las regiones (Especialmente Bizkaia) más industrializadas de España durante este periodo.
Events in Catalonia over the past several weeks have focused international attention on the region, but few media outlets have considered the historical context in which these events take place. In the first special edition of the podcast, historians of Catalonia James Stout and Maria Carreras discuss the origins of the Catalan nationalism in the late nineteenth century and trace evolution of the Catalanist movement over the course of the twentieth. They also also draw on their own historical research to provide unique insights on the current situation in Catalonia.
The dream of a cultural, linguistic and racial union between Spain and its former colonies in the Americas has been a pervasive idea in the Spanish imaginary, surviving to this day. When and how did this idea of Hispanoamérica emerge, and how did it evolve over time? This month’s guest, Rodrigo Escribano Roca, explores these questions in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberalism, from the Constitution of 1812 to present-day neo-liberal and anti-colonial discourses.
En este episodio, el profesor Eduardo González Calleja habla de sus esfuerzos para documentar y categorizar cada caso de violencia política mortal de la Segunda República. Ha publicado los resultados de sus investigaciones recientemente en el libro Cifras cruentas: las víctimas mortales de la violencia sociopolítica en la Segunda República española (1931-1936). Consideramos los nuevos datos en su contexto historiográfico e internacional para descubrir qué pueden revelar las cifras sobre el carácter y causas de esta violencia política que fue tan devastadora para la República.
The Castilian Civil War is a classic medieval tale of shifting alliances, family intrigue and murder. But what was the international context and significance of this conflict? How did contemporary chroniclers tell its story? In this episode of the Historias podcast, Bretton Rodriguez discusses how this literally fratricidal conflict changed the course of not only the Castilian monarchy but also of literature and historiography on the Iberian Peninsula and beyond.
Episode 1- The Emergence of Anarchist Hegemony in Spain’s Labor Movement by Historias Podcast