Historias

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 I, we examine how department stores thrived even within the restrictive culture of the dictatorship.

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.

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.

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.

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.