Historias: The Spanish History Podcast

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...

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...

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 histor...

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 a...

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 t...

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 hel...

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 conceptio...

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...

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...

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...

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 cent...

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 bi...

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 earl...

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 wer...

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 i...

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 forei...

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 so...

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 histo...

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 “...

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 soldi...

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 f...

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...

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 betwe...

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....

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...