Spanish History Research Articles

Reconstructing 800 years of historical eruptive activity at Popocatépetl Volcano, Mexico

Pictorial and written documents spanning 800 years were analyzed for information about historical eruptions at Popocatepetl volcano. These documents were prepared by several indigenous groups as well as by the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries during their military campaigns and long-term evangelization and colonization and later on, by Indian nobles and Spanish historians. Pre-Columbian drawings show flames coming out of Popocatepetl’s crater while later descriptions from the Spanish colonial period in Mexico (1521 to 1821) refer to ash emission and ballistics, lahars, and some pumice falls, similar to what were depicted in the thirteenth to sixteenth century drawings. Graphic information from the pre-Columbian codices, colonial maps, and paintings referring to the eruptions were correlated with historical accounts and religious chronicles, thereby leading to the reconstruction of a more detailed sequence of eruptive events. From such information, it was possible for us to prepare ash distribution maps for the 1540, 1592, and 1664 eruptions. Most of the known historical eruptions seem to be similar to those that have been occurring at Popocatepetl since 1994, indicating the importance of ash emission and crater dome formation throughout its recent eruptive history. The strongest eruptions occurred in 1510, 1519, 1540, 1580, 1664, and 2001; these produced widespread ash falls that affected both populated and rural areas. Duration of eruptive episodes during the past 800 years were estimated to have ranged from less than a year to more than 30 years, separated by repose periods ranging between 7 and over 100 years.

The Open Window: Women in Spain’s Second Republic and Civil War

This article intends to be a brief introduction to a sometimes neglected issue of the recent Spanish history: the extraordinary progress the short-lived Second Republic (1931-1936) meant for women. The significant and somewhat revolutionary achievements at a social, legal, and political level were shadowed by the Civil War and the long forty years of the subsequent dictatorship. However, studying and recovering the history of women during the Republican period enables us to better understand to what extent Franco’s regime was a dramatic step backwards also in terms of women’s rights.

Crematorio or a Local Case of a Global Crime Film/Television

This article discusses the miniseries Crematorio (Crematorium, Canal+, 2011) as the convergence point of several social and textual currents that illustrate the condition of contemporary Spanish television as a local industry influenced by global change. These currents include the strategy of Canal+ to expand by creating quality television, the influence of producers that look to the industrial modes of the United States, obvious references to contemporary Spanish social history, and the adoption of a visual and narrative language meant to yield the complexity associated with quality television of the HBO type. Crematorio shares HBO’s genre revisionism, increased realism, social critique, and psychological introspection, which overlap a new global trend of crime film and television, while acting and the attitude towards corruption reflect its local nature.

‘So, you want us to be Englishmen … ’: Jovellanos and British influence on Spain’s first modern parliament (1808–1810)

The first modern Parliament in Spanish history held its opening session on 24 September 1810 and was known as ‘Cortes de Cádiz’. It was conceived in light of the French Assemblée National pattern, as most members of Spanish liberalism admired French revolutionary political thought. However, an alternative had already been put forward. From 1808 to 1810, the most prominent character in the Spanish Enlightenment, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, had tried to promote the establishment of a Spanish Assembly similar to the British parliament. Supported by two British figures, Lord Holland and John Allen, Jovellanos designed a detailed plan to introduce the British system of a ‘balanced constitution’ in Spain for the first time.

La cultura africanista en el Ejército español (1909-1975)

The Spanish military mentality in the twentieth century cannot be understood without the component of “Africanism”. Since the nineteenth century, economic, strategic and other interests in Northern Africa led to a growing interest in the colonization of Morocco, which materialized in 1912 with the establishment of the Spanish Protectorate. This territory became in fact a “stronghold” of the military, a territory where they could exercise their power with little interference from politicians. It favored the emergence of a distinctive mentality among a good number of men serving in this environment. Thus, the term “Africanism”, which had been so far used to refer to individuals who defended Spanish interests in North Africa, turned out to be used mainly to refer to this military mentality. Usually, the term “Africanism” has been traditionally used to refer to ultraconservative ideology and antidemocratic political ideas, then shared by officers eager to achieve military promotion on the basis of war merit. They also shared violent practices and ideals rooted in their war experience. After clarifying the concept of “Africanism”, this article explores the long-term impact of this military mentality in Spanish history.

Pura Vida: Beginning Spanish by Norma López-Burton and Laura Marqués Pascual

Reviewed by: Pura Vida: Beginning Spanish by Norma López-Burton and Laura Marqués Pascual Carol Wallace López-Burton, Norma, Laura Marqués Pascual, and Cristina Pardo Ballester. Pura Vida: Beginning Spanish. Hoboken: Wiley, 2014. Pp. 490. ISBN 978-1-118-08710-7 [paperback] / ISBN 978-1-118-51476-4 [looseleaf] / ISBN 978-1-118-51474-0 [activities manual] / ISBN 978-1-118-38170-0 [instructor’s edition]. In her author statement for the Pura Vida: Beginng Spanish textbook, Norma López Burton says that her goal has been to build “a curriculum in which all activities would be truly communicative, and all instructors would present culture in a sensitive and consistent manner” (vii). Her stated desire to break down cultural stereotypes that lump all “Hispanics” into a single group is evident in the structuring of the textbook around individual countries and regions, including the seldom mentioned Equatorial Guinea. Short readings explain cultural practices within those specific countries and the cultural context is often integrated into vocabulary and grammar activities. This emphasis on culture is one of the strengths of the book, but also proves to be one of its weaknesses. According to ACTFL’s proficiency guidelines, students at the novice and intermediate levels communicate primarily on familiar personal topics, but this understanding is often compromised in the interests of presenting culturally relevant material. For example, the vocabulary list for the clothing chapter includes items in a Guatemalan market, but fails to include many of the things actually worn by students. In chapter 6, the preterit forms of all verbs, regular, stem-changing and irregular, are presented in the context of Spanish history and art. New verbs include atacar, conquistar, derrotar, invadir, gobernar, and so on—few of which are useful to students in their daily lives—and the ordinal numbers are presented by using the series of kings named Alfonso in Spanish history. Activities that require students to identify historical people or place historical events in order do not spark the interest of the majority of students and are not highly useful for novice level communication tasks. The book contains a preliminary chapter and 12 complete chapters, each of which is really two chapters with separate vocabulary lists and grammar sections. The chapters are well laid out with a list of learning objectives at the beginning of each section and a checklist for students [End Page 697] at the end of each section. Pura vida contains a comprehensive array of traditional grammar topics, up to and including the past subjunctive and hypothetical situations in the last chapter. The last two chapters of the text may be eliminated to better fit a two-semester sequence, but this leaves out some important topics such as the present perfect, which could logically be presented much earlier. The graphics in the book are generally attractive, although some of the pictures used to present vocabulary can be difficult to identify and the authors’ decision to place cognates in a separate list at the bottom without using them in the graphics may lead students to ignore these important words. There are some errors, such as a picture in the chapter on professions that is labeled a dentist but actually shows an eye doctor, which will presumably be corrected in future editions. Each section has two illustrated narrative sequences called “La pura verdad,” which can be presented with audio via the multimedia Power Point presentations supplied on the website. These sequences often have a humorous element, which sometimes works and sometimes falls flat. Each chapter also provides a video involving a conversation between a native speaker and a non-native speaker. The purpose seems to be to encourage students to see that their Spanish doesn’t need to be perfect in order to communicate, but in at least one case the non-native speaker’s accent is so poor that it consistently elicits laughter from students who have been studying the language for only a few weeks. This same chapter 3 video also contains a scene where the female student, who is being given a tour of a home by a male friend, flops down on the bed and comments on how comfortable it...

José Del Valle: A political history of Spanish. The making of a language

José Del Valle: A political history of Spanish. The making of a language

СУЧАСНА ІСТОРІОГРАФІЯ ГРОМАДЯНСЬКОЇ ВІЙНИ В ІСПАНІЇ (1936–1939) ТА ПЕРСПЕКТИВИ УКРАЇНСЬКИХ ДОСЛІДЖЕНЬ

The article analyzes the current state of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) historiography. The main emphasis is made on the achievements of Spanish historians and their colleagues from the UK and the US. The stages of important research areas and their weaknesses and prospects for future research are allocated and synthesized. Ukrainian part of the topic study and the possibilities for its improvement by involving a variety of sources, including archival and new methods of writing history are separately pointed out.

Anatomy and Anatomists in Early Modern Spain by Bjørn Okholm Skaarup

Reviewed by: Anatomy and Anatomists in Early Modern Spain by Bjørn Okholm Skaarup Kristy Wilson Bowers Bjørn Okholm Skaarup. Anatomy and Anatomists in Early Modern Spain. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2015. xii + 285 pp. Ill. $124.95 (978-1-4724-4826-2). Bjørn Skaarup’s study is a welcome addition to the history of anatomy, offering a much-needed perspective on Spain. Skaarup focuses specifically on the practice and teaching of human anatomy in late sixteenth-century Spain both before and after the publication of Andreas Vesalius’s seminal text, De humani corporis fabrica (1543). The anatomical renaissance of the sixteenth century has received great attention, most of it centered on Vesalius and his colleagues and successors. Spain has long been dismissed by both biographers of Vesalius and historians of anatomy as an insular and highly traditional society uninterested in new learning. Skaarup challenges these traditional assumptions, showing instead both the deep interest in anatomical studies and “the highly complex and previously often oversimplified circumstances surrounding anatomical research” (p. 19) in Spain. In order to do so, Skaarup carefully works through the conflicting interpretations in the secondary literature, as well as conflicting information given in Spanish anatomical and surgical texts themselves, which often present conflicting claims of primacy for discoveries or practices. Skaarup begins with a clear and well-grounded discussion of “la polémica de la ciencia Española,” the debate over Spanish “backwardness” in the sciences which originated in the nineteenth century. This is a well-written summation in which Skaarup offers a solid introduction to key questions of Spanish historiography that will be particularly helpful for those scholars drawn to the subject of the book but not familiar with the Spanish context. For those more familiar with the debates, this opening offers a useful encapsulation of key issues. Throughout the remainder of the text, Skaarup refers frequently to this historiography, both challenging and reaffirming traditional interpretations based on his own research. Following this introductory chapter, the book spends the next six chapters examining the particular circumstances at universities in both Castile and Aragon: Valencia, Salamanca, Valladolid, Alcalá de Henares, Barcelona, and Zaragoza. The final chapters examine anatomy “Beyond the Universities” (which is to say, at the Monastery of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe), “Beyond Iberia” (which looks at early treatises published in Mexico), and in images. In all of these, the author carefully sifts through evidence from both primary and secondary sources to lay out both the physical and intellectual development of anatomical studies in each place. From the earliest anatomical studies at Valencia to the earliest permanent anatomical theater at the University of Salamanca to the University of Valladolid’s lack of a permanent chair of anatomy, Skaarup offers a detailed portrait of anatomical studies within their regional contexts. At Salamanca, for example, despite the early embrace of anatomical dissections for teaching, within two generations the teaching program had reverted to Galenic principles and theories. Valladolid, by contrast, despite never creating a permanent chair of anatomy, produced the first Spanish vernacular text on anatomy, Bernardino Montaña’s Libro de la anothomia del hombre (1551). These regional distinctions, not only between Castile and Aragon but also between cities within each realm, are crucial for understanding [End Page 331] any aspect of Spanish history, and Skaarup has wisely structured his text as a sort of geographical survey in order to accommodate the distinctions. Beyond the details of anatomical study that Skaarup illuminates, his study strongly reinforces the idea that scientific knowledge rarely moves in a straight line of progression, but rather often waxes and wanes. The “new” anatomy of Vesalius was in many cases accepted and taught for a time at Spanish universities, only to later be abandoned in favor of a return to traditional Galenic views, while the practice of dissection for teaching purposes likewise grew then shrank. Skaarup is careful to take these intellectual shifts on their own terms, neither promoting some as “forward thinking” nor chastising others for “backwardness.” As he states, these anatomical studies “were frequently instigated and supported by the highest authorities, but also often collided with a society embedded in religious, scientific and medical orthodoxy” (p. 19). This is...

Ramón Menéndez Pidal: The Practice and Politics of Philology in Twentieth-Century Spain by Steven Hess

Reviewed by: Ramón Menéndez Pidal: The Practice and Politics of Philology in Twentieth-Century Spain by Steven Hess Omar Velázquez-Mendoza Hess, Steven. Ramón Menéndez Pidal: The Practice and Politics of Philology in Twentieth-Century Spain. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2014. 385 pp. ISBN: 978-1-58871-252-3 Hess’ Ramón Menéndez Pidal: The Practice and Politics of Philology in Twentieth-Century Spain (hereafter Practice and Politics) captures the many facets of the scholarly trajectory of one of Hispanism’s most influential figures: Ramón Menéndez Pidal. By relating political moves in Spain’s academic spheres to larger political phenomena, this book situates Menéndez Pidal’s scholarship within the context of a changing political environment, from the Spanish-American war to the Franco regime. From Hess’ latest research on Don Ramón an interesting (and previously unknown) fact emerges: from 1940-1944 the Tribunal de Responsabilidades Políticas excluded the aging scholar from all Spanish institutions except the Royal Academy. This thought-provoking and well-organized monograph provides a comprehensive biography of Don Ramón (Chapter 1), as well as a detailed synopsis of the many contributions made by the maestro’s scholarship to the fields of Romance linguistics (Chapter 2) and medieval literature (Chapter 3). His particular, Castilian-centered way of interpreting Spanish history during his productive career is also addressed (Chapter 4), as well as his role in the Generation of 1898 (Chapter 5) and his founding of the so-called “Madrid School” of philology (Chapter 6). The private correspondence between Don Ramón and his disciples and other towering scholars of ninetieth- and twentieth-century philology (Lapesa, Corominas, Armistead, etc.) allows us to get up close and personal with the Madrid School and its direct and indirect ramifications in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. These documents were made public, in part, due to the generosity of the Fundación Menéndez Pidal, but also thanks to Hess’ own archival research. The intimate look at Don Ramón and his scholarly circle that this monograph provides is complemented by a close examination of many fragments of several of his speeches, his public lectures, and, to some degree, their reception as well. Cited fragments receive a close English translation, making this book highly accessible to the non-specialized reader. [End Page 139] The contributions of Menéndez Pidal to Hispanic linguistics and to medieval literature and culture cannot be overlooked, as Hispanic studies since the Generation of 1898, even to this day, have set out either to prove or to disprove many of the scholar’s theories and assertions. Amongst these one can cite the existence (in linguistic terms, above all) of the latent state (estado latente) of a given phenomenon before it can surface in the written norm, authorship issues surrounding the Cantar de mio Cid, the origins of the romancero as an offspring of medieval epic, the preponderance of the Castilian dialect in the formation of the Spanish language, etc. Hess’ evaluation of Menéndez Pidal’s assertions are fair insofar as he stresses that, even if the maestro’s conclusions are, for the most part, valid (the latent sate of Mozarabic lyric in the medieval Iberian tradition before the jarchas were discovered, to name but one example), he correctly notes that not every conclusion at which Don Ramón arrived should be taken as undisputable dogma. Some of the examples of Menéndez Pidal’s debatable proposals cited by Hess are: equating the Spanish language, both historically and linguistically, with the Castilian dialect; his “corrections” to the manuscript of the Cantar de mio Cid; the alleged abundance of epic poetry during the High Middle Ages; the nature of Spanish epic as a reliable mirror of historical events; and a Hispano-Celtic etymon attributed to the word Madrid, which neither Malkiel nor Corominas endorsed; among others. Surprisingly, however, the most debatable of all of Menéndez Pidal’s debatable postulates, the issue of the triglossic coexistence of Latin, Castilian Romance, and Leonese Vulgar Latin during the High Middle Ages, is not mentioned in the chapter devoted to Romance Linguistics of this work. Hess’ Practice and...

Conceptualizing Americanness: U.S. Drama in Spain, 1910–1930

This essay surveys presence of North American dramatic works (1) in Spain in early twentieth century, and seeks to investigate shifting conception of Americanness of audiences who consumed American plays, and critics who discussed, and companies which produced, them. While in an early moment being American was disconcertingly something that even a play not written by an American could be, throughout 1930s, coinciding with profound revolution in all orders of life which culminated in Spanish Civil War, American theater came to be seen more and more diverse; an American play was merely one written by an American, without that nationality precluding any kind of play. Such a truism was not easy to embrace, there were still those who believed America could only produce one specific kind of (highly successful and popular) commodity. This indispensable step toward a less univocal, more nuanced appreciation of American drama could not have been taken without work of theater critics. Whatever one is to think about job (not a few American playwrights have resented their power), Spanish critics of 1920s rendered an invaluable service of dis-essentializing Americanness in theater. popular perception for a long time was that American theater started with Eugene O'Neill, and we have all found him referred to more than once father of American drama, as though American theatre came into existence a sudden grace with Eugene O'Neill and his suitcase of plays its only begetter (Wilmeth and Bigsby, Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume Two xv). (2) Curiously enough, a Spanish history of American drama could never start by surveying O'Neill's work, latter was only culminating point of a long exposure to purely commercial offerings America (while more and more voices, nevertheless, claimed that another American drama existed). Thomas Postlewait, in The Hyeroglyphic Stage: American Theatre and Society, Post-Civil War to 1945, posits Gilbert Seldes's 1924 volume Seven Lively Arts among first books to vindicate popular tradition of theater and entertainment, from minstrelsy, circuses, and vaudeville to popular entertainment of modern stage, screen, radio, and television the definitive achievement of American culture and failing to honor it not only incomplete but myopic (125). Postlewait goes on to object to realism and naturalism's being considered starting points of any worthwhile theatrical tradition, something which obviously marginalizes all other forms of theatrical expression, especially less logocentric ones (125-26). Spain, however, makes it possible to historicize American theater in a wholly different way. As we will promptly see, in matter of importations America, curtain opened on all more popular hits, with their panoply of tricks, stage effects, surprising plot twists and whatnot, while more serious drama would only come much later. It is not easy to pinpoint when exactly first American play was produced in Spain, but there is evidence that it was not before 1910s. Before this decade, shows derived some American novel or short story could be seen occasionally, but were so much tampered with that little of original (if anything) lived on in stage work inspired by it. Such is case of Lagricultor de Xicago, a Catalan playscript which opened in Barcelona in 1909, based on Gabriel Timmory's 1906 Le cultivateur de Chicago. Timmory drew inspiration Mark Twain's How I Edited an Agricultural Paper but moved in directions not distantly anticipated or suggested by American original. Even before that, Uncle Tom's Cabin had had a fruitful life on Spanish stages ever since its first occurrence in Madrid in 1853. Early in twentieth century playscript, based once more on a French version, went back to Spanish theaters for generally successful runs. …

Francisco Giner y el descubrimiento moderno del paisaje de España

Francisco Giner de los Ríos (1839-1915), fundador en 1876 de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza, inició, en los últimos decenios del siglo XIX, un verdadero descubrimiento del paisaje de España. Planteó una nueva visión del paisaje español, que incorporó la perspectiva del paisajismo geográfico moderno, inicialmente promovido por Humboldt. Esta nueva perspectiva atribuyó a ese paisaje un conjunto de valores culturales que se consideraron expresivos de la propia historia y de la identidad colectiva o nacional derivada de ella. Giner y sus colaboradores de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza vieron en el paisaje español (y sobre todo en el paisaje de Castilla y la Sierra de Guadarrama) un verdadero símbolo nacional.

The Fossils of Atapuerca: Scientific Nationalism and the New Beginning of Spanish History

AbstractNumerous studies have shown how closely nation‐building accompanies research into human prehistory. While these studies primarily focus on the period before 1945, the example of the Spanish site Atapuerca demonstrates that the strong link between hominid fossils and national identity still exists in the twenty‐first century. The article argues that there are different ways of appropriating prehistoric human remains. One may distinguish the concept of ‘biological continuity’ in which the fossils represent some kind of ancestor from the concept of ‘scientific nationalism’. The latter consists in the pride in the scholarly achievement and international recognition of ‘our own’ scientists. The Atapuerca project was crucial in overcoming the Spanish ‘inferiority complex’ with respect to scientific prowess. In Atapuerca we may even discern a third concept: the marketing of origins in order to lure tourists to the site – nationalism enterprised‐up. The Spanish researchers created a multifold ‘popularization industry’ and forged a close alliance with the national media. Thus, this article will try to explain how Atapuerca turned within less than ten years from a little known archaeological site to the – however imaginary – starting point of Spanish history at the turn of the millennium.

Modern Spanish History in North America

In 2004, the British journal Social History published a special issue on modern Spain. This was, to my knowledge, an unprecedented event. My contribution was a short report entitled «Spanish historians and the English-speaking world» in which I looked at the place of modern Spain in European history, primarily in North America, and the role of historians from Spain. I started the piece by referring to a «cuarenta principales» song from the 1970s, «I never been to Spain», to make the underlyin...

Radio, memory and conflict: Reconstructing the past in Documentos RNE

Abstract In this article we adopt a cultural approach to radio, and specifically to radio documentaries about recent Spanish history, focusing on an analysis of Documentos RNE, which, from 1999 to date, has been broadcasting documentaries that employ the vast sound archives of Radio Nacional de España (RNE). The archives and their use in historical memory programmes represent a true national repository with which to reconstruct collective memory. Through a more detailed analysis of five documentaries broadcast between 2008 and 2014, we examine major topics such as the Second Republic, the Civil War, the post-war period, the Franco dictatorship and the Transition to Democracy. The article show how Documentos RNE included the mentioned topics in its list of programmes and what type of audio-visual language resources were common on the reconstruction of the past.

One Step Closer To a Believable Francisco Franco Bahamonde

One Step Closer To a Believable Francisco Franco Bahamonde Ricardo Landeira Payne, Stanley and Jesús Palacios. Franco. A Personal and Political Biography. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. Pp. 617. ISBN 978-0-299-30210-8. More has been written about the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) than any other conflict in the 20th century. Such historical fixation can no doubt be attributed firstly to the grim spectacle of a nation convulsed by unspeakable carnage and ideological retribution, but ultimately to what many foresaw as impending doom for other more powerful countries than Spain vying for the largest stake imaginable, that of global hegemony. Germany, Italy, Russia, Britain, France and the United States all played significant roles in the Spanish war; the first three, in fact, became near protagonists, and Germany and Italy tipped the balance to such an extent that, once committed to Franco’s Nationalist side, the outcome was hardly ever in doubt. Every historical event of such magnitude has its heroes as well as its villains, the former chosen from among the victors, and the latter fingered from among the vanquished by those same victors. And yet the Spanish Civil War, as in so many other ways (eg., a civil conflict with international combatants), turns out counter to such expectations. Here, a single individual has been made to play both roles by all of the critics and historians who’ve dedicated major portions of their lives and writings to the subject. Other than the implicated foreign leaders, readily characterized by universal consensus (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin on one side and Churchill and FDR on the other), Francisco Franco (1892–1975) has been portrayed, alternately, as either the most demonized or the most lionized European leader of recent memory. In the course of half a century of scholarship, time and again, Stanley Payne has authored some of the most significant volumes about Spain and its dominant political figures, among them Franco. His titles include: Falange: A History of Spanish Fascism (1961), Politics and the Military in Modern Spain (1967), The Spanish Revolution (1970), A History of Spain and Portugal (1973), Basque Nationalism (1975), Fascism: Comparison and Definition (1980), Spanish Catholicism (1984), and the immediate forerunner to the present volume, published in 1987, The Franco Regime (1936–1975). Here, Payne, in collaboration with the Spanish historian and journalist Jesús Palacios, returns to his favorite [End Page 185] subject with a balanced, sober, and well documented account of Spain’s longest and most notorious head of state since Philip II’s sixteenth century reign. The Hapsburg King’s tomb rests in the monumental palace of El Escorial, which he ordered erected (1563–1584) to commemorate the victory of the Battle of San Quintín. It parallels Franco’s own folly when he ordered an equally outsized basilica, the Valley of the Fallen, a scant ten kilometers away. Forty thousand Civil War casualties lay buried there, among them José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange and Franco’s formidable rival. Franco himself, of course, is the only occupant of the mausoleum who died in bed decades later. Three major contributing factors may explain this volume’s ring of historical veracity. First, its double authorship, by an admired American scholar of unquestioned stature and amazing productivity and by a respected and seasoned Spanish journalist and educator, which lend it a balanced and thus less biased version of Franco and his regime. Secondly, the passage of time itself—75 years since the end of the Civil War and 39 since Franco’s death—which attenuates the passions of those directly and indirectly involved in both the three-year conflict and its four-decade long authoritarian aftermath. And thirdly, the accessibility to key archives finally open to researchers, as well as the willingness of those individuals close to the dictator to offer oral testimony, including his daughter and members of his retinue, who were previously unable to speak freely. Exemplary for their clarity and the dispassionate portrayal of a modern day dictator, Franco. A Personal and Political Biography’s twenty chapters plus conclusion are chronologically ordered, and accompanied by nearly one hundred pages of notes and a comprehensive index. The very...

Preface: Why Do Emotions History?

Expansion of the field of emotions history to include greater participation by Spanish scholars and greater attention to applications of the approach to Spanish history – which this volume reflects and promotes – is a truly welcome development. It’s clear that one of the several signs of success in this vibrant subfield is extending the geographical range, and Spain is emerging as a key case in point. I welcome the invitation to contribute a few comments about the field by way of introduction.

<b>Generación del 27/ hip hop in 2007: cultural vanguard in performance

This paper discusses the production of the so-called Generation of 27 and the documentary Generacion 27 - Creacion, vanguardia y vida , Canal Sur Andalucia, Spain, in honor of the 80 years of the movement. We address the performance matter, according to the theory by Zumthor (2000), which can be compared to what the participants of that generation did during that period in their artistic encounters, and in a parallel way to what some artists that express themselves through rap and graffiti did in 2007, by resuming the poetic, musical and visual creations of the artists of 1927. We develop a comparative analysis of these productions and of what participants of the Spanish movement (ALONSO; GUILLEN, 1984) and literary historians (CONCHA, 1984) argue about the period, and of authors (REYES-SANCHEZ, 2007; HALL, 2011) who research the cultural manifestations that are closer to the new global social reality. We conclude that both movements, Generation of ‘27 and the artists of 2007, seek, with their productions, to give visibility to the plurality of voices of the popular and street tradition, even though the documentary suggests the presence of a hegemonic and institutional apparatus that somehow interacts and interferes with the maintenance and / or expansion of this process.

Palabras para un ideal lingüístico: los nombres de la lengua elaborada en la historia del español

The aim of this work is to examine the variations in naming formal varieties of language. It offers an overview of the changes in its characterisation, construction and qualification through the names which have been associated with it in the course of the history of Spanish. These names point to distinctions found at the universal level of language and manifested in the historical language through terms resulting from codes of western rhetoric or discourse universes such as magnitudes, artistic criticism or external composition.

Modernizing the Nation: Spain during the Reign of Alfonso XIII, 1902–1931. By Javier Moreno-Luzón. Studies in Spanish History. Edited by Nigel Townson et al.Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012. Pp. x+192. £50.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsModernizing the Nation: Spain during the Reign of Alfonso XIII, 1902–1931. By Javier Moreno-Luzón. Studies in Spanish History. Edited by Nigel Townson et al.Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012. Pp. x+192. £50.00 (cloth).Carolyn P. BoydCarolyn P. BoydUniversity of California, Irvine Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 87, Number 2June 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/681187 Views: 77Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.