Historias: The Spanish History Podcast

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.