Spanish History Research Articles

History of the Historiography of Spanish Textbooks and Treatises on International Law of the 19th Century

The bibliography of Spanish international law textbooks is a good indicator of the evolution of the historiography of international law. Spanish historiography, with its own special features, was a recipient of the great debates concerning naturalism v. positivism and universalism v. particularism that flourished in European and American historiography in the nineteenth century. This study is articulated on four principal axes. The first states how the writings of the philosophes continued to dominate the way in which the subject was conceived in mid-nineteenth century Spain. Secondly, it explores the popularization and democratization of international law through the work of Concepcion Arenal and the heterodox thought of Rafael Maria de Labra. Thirdly, it examines the first textbooks of international law with their distinct natural law bias, but imbued with certain positivist elements. These textbooks trawled sixteenth century Spanish history, searching for the origins of international law and thus demonstrating the historical civilizing role of Spain, particularly in America. Fourthly, it considers the vision of institutionist, heterodox reformers and bourgeois liberals who proclaimed the universality of international law, not without some degree of ambivalence, and their defence of Spain as the object of civilization and also a civilizing subject. In conclusion, the article argues that the late development of textbooks was a consequence of the late institutionalization of the study of international law during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the legacy of the nineteenth century survives in the most progressive of contemporary polemics for a new international law.

Alien Speech, Incorporated: On the Cultural History of Spanish in the US

Over six million people file into US classrooms each year with the aim of learning Spanish. They are met by a dazzling array of textbooks, videos, interactive software, and monetized online resources targeted not only at tuition-paying consumers, but also at a substantial, if uncountable, number of learners outside the formal space of the classroom: the ambitious self-teachers and brusher-uppers who are also served by this segment of the multibillion-dollar educational publishing industry. In the face of this formidable market, let me pose a naïve question: why don't these would-be learners walk instead to a nearby location where they are likely to find one of the nation's twenty-eight million Spanish-speaking persons—a lettuce field in Salinas, a slaughterhouse in Ottumwa, a cable-company service center in Hoboken, a restaurant kitchen pretty much anywhere in the country—and instead hire a native speaker to teach them? Competing against those low-wage labor markets, the enterprising student could surely strike a smart educational bargain.1

Los archivos, la intimidad de las personas y los secretos de Estado

This paper reviews the laws and norms regulating access to public documents in Spain, as well as their actual implementation in archival institutions and their consequences for historical research. Despite the liberal character of the early laws enacted in the democratic period, the publication of subsequent privacy regulations has severely curtailed access to historical documents. The vagueness and contradictions of the relevant norms, combined with the negligence typical of Spanish public archives, are posing greater burdens in researchers’ access to archival material. A situation worsened by the recent governmental decision to extend the scope of the State Secrets Act (Ley de Secretos Oficiales) to cover a number of issues relating to foreign policy. As a result, historians are finding more and more difficult the study of recent Spanish History.

Nuevos y viejos discursos de la transición. La nostalgia del consenso

The prevailing account of the Transition has lead to a canonical version full of deep-rooted topics and myths that make hardly easy to criticize a stereotyped explanation of democratization. In fact, to express the need for a review of some aspects of political change in Spain is still a rather awkward exercise. This is due to the mainstream hypothesis that emphasised the transitional process as a model and a symbol of a golden peaceful stage in recent Spanish history. The unthinking adherence to these ideas also coined the term consenso as the key analytical concept of that calm and idealized period. But the daily press resources and the memoirs of some important figures of the period can help us to question this politically motivated approach. Our contention is to show that the praised consenso did not exist in critical and very troubled moments during the political change. So, to claim the transition and democracy as a collective achievement is today a social requirement in Spain that cannot be tarnished by an exclusive discourse.

Wayne H. Bowen. Spain and the American Civil War.

Amid the recent interest in internationalizing the history of the American Civil War, Spain has received little attention. As Wayne H. Bowen observes, existing scholarship on the wider world's engagement with the American conflict has focused too much on Britain and, to a lesser extent, France. To ignore Spain and its Caribbean colonies, he successfully demonstrates in this book, is to miss an important part of the story. A potentially important part of the story, at least. For Bowen does not so much argue that Spain actually affected the course of the Civil War in any significant way (or, for that matter, that the Civil War had any fundamental impact on Spanish history) as that it might have done so. Bowen makes a major contribution to our understanding of the global implications of the Civil War by sketching out the contours of Spanish responses to the U.S. crisis against the backdrop of Spain's global presence in the 1850s and 1860s. After decades of decline, these years saw a resurgence of Spain's global aspirations, inspiring interventions in the Crimea, Indochina, Morocco, Mexico, and most importantly Santo Domingo, which was re-annexed by Spain between 1861 and 1865 in a move that would have been unthinkable had the United States not been distracted by civil war. Spain seemed poised to grasp any opportunity to reestablish some portion of its former global dominance. Events in the United States between 1861 and 1865 offered just such an opportunity, but it was one of which Spain ultimately did not take advantage.

Juicio y valoración de las siete primeras semanas de la II República, vistas por un escritor jesuita. El diario del Padre Alberto Risco, Sj (1873-1937)

Father Alberto Risco (1873-1937) was a renowned author of Christian texts of popular and edifying nature, the main ones being his well-known novel Emigracion[Emigration] and his Compendio de Historia de la Literatura Espanola [Compendium of the Spanish Literature History] . In his diary he follows with passion and detail the first seven weeks of the Second Spanish Republic. Fr. Risco, more inclined to fundamentalism and traditionalism rather than to the Republic, gives us a vivid, personal and latent view of the situation along the lines of the writings of analysts and journalists of that time. As Jesuit, his biggest concern was the fate of the Church and of the Society of Jesus. Consequently, he stopped writing on the painful 11th May 1931.

The Song of Disappearance: Memory, History, and Testimony in the Poetry of Antonio Gamoneda

The Song of Disappearance: Memory, History, and Testimony in the Poetry of Antonio Gamoneda

Information literacy perceptions and behaviour among history students

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discover Spanish history students' subjective perception of their information literacy (IL) status in order to find and suggest some academic and individual improvement actions.Design/methodology/approach – The implementation of the IL‐HUMASS survey provides diagnostic data on two IL quantitative dimensions (belief in importance and skills self‐assessment) and a third qualitative dimension (learning habits) deployed along 26 variables, which are grouped into four categories (search, evaluation, processing, and communication‐dissemination of information).Findings – The analysis confirms that variables related to information processing (above all schematising and abstracting information) show high scores of belief in importance and skills self‐assessment among students. By contrast, variables related to technological advances (above all the use of bibliographic reference managers) show the worst results. In sum, there is a lack of subjective digital literacy in a se...

Peninsularity and patriotism: Spanish and British approaches to the Peninsular War, 1808-14

The Peninsular War until recently has failed to receive comprehensive and critical attention from Spanish and British historians, their outputs having been partial, narrative and ideological in nature. While Spanish scholars have contested the meaning of the ‘nation’ forged during the 1808–14 war so bitterly that they have been slow to establish a synthesis, British scholars have tended not to venture beyond Anglocentrism. Starting in the nineteen-fifties, however, modern historical methods began to change this situation. Since the nineteen-nineties a ‘new military history’ approach has influenced Peninsular War historiography, allowing, for the first time, for a ‘total’ history of the conflict.

Mary I: England's Catholic queen

The lifestory of Mary I-daughter of Henry VIII and his Spanish wife, Catherine of Aragon-is often distilled to a few dramatic episodes: her victory over the attempted coup by Lady Jane Grey, the imprisonment of her half-sister Elizabeth, the bloody burning of Protestants, her short marriage to Philip of Spain. This original and deeply researched biography paints a far more detailed portrait of Mary and offers a fresh understanding of her religious faith and policies as well as her historical significance in England and beyond. John Edwards, a leading scholar of English and Spanish history, is the first to make full use of Continental archives in this context, especially Spanish ones, to demonstrate how Mary's culture, Catholic faith, and politics were thoroughly Spanish. Edwards begins with Mary's origins, follows her as she battles her increasingly erratic father, and focuses particular attention on her notorious religious policies, some of which went horribly wrong from her point of view. The book concludes with a consideration of Mary's five-year reign and the frustrations that plagued her final years.Childless, ill, deserted by her husband, Mary died in the full knowledge that her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth would undo her religious work and, without acknowledging her sister, would reap the benefits of Mary's achievements in government.

Polluter Pays … Provided that Someone Condemns Him

On April 25, 2008 the dam of the mine managed by Boliden Apirsa SL in Aznalcollar (Seville, Spain) crashed and a fatal toxic waste caused the worst environmental disaster in recent Spanish history. Almost 15 years later, the environment has been recovered, but Spanish courts still discuss who has to pay the huge costs of the recovery. Three decisions of the Spanish Supreme Court, recently rendered, have make things still more complicated by deciding that the administrative courts are not able to solve the claim of the Andalusian Government against the Boliden industries.

Evolución e historia de la lengua española (review)

Reviewed by: Evolución e historia de la lengua española Steven N. Dworkin María Jesús Torrens Álvarez. Evolución e historia de la lengua española. Manuales de formación de profesores de español 2/L. Madrid: Arco/Libros, 2007. 309 pp. ISBN: 978-84-7635-712-5 At first glance it may seem strange that a book dealing with the development and history of the Spanish language should appear in a series of “Manuales de formación de profesores de español 2/L”. Its author, María Jesús Torrens Álvarez, has solid credentials as a scholar in Hispanic philology and in the teaching of Spanish as a second language. In the former category she is probably best known for her edition and linguistic study of the Fuero de Alcalá. The premise underlying the book under review is that an understanding of the main features of the evolution of the language will aid the instructor in teaching selected structures of Spanish to the language learner. Historical linguists have long observed that structures that synchronically on the surface seem to be irregular and unpredictable, and are taught as such to language learners, actually reflect regular processes of historical change. To offer just a handful of examples, such verb-stem alternations as vuelvo ∼ volvemos ← volver, [End Page 376] siento ∼ sentimos ∼ sintieron ← sentir, digo ∼ dices (OSp. dizes) ← decir; so-called “irregular” verb forms as pret. dijo, hizo ← decir, hacer; or the participles dicho, hecho all result from regular processes of sound change in the passage from Latin to Spanish. Such knowledge may help the instructor to understand better the background of such forms, and thus aid in their effective presentation to the student. The author is not suggesting that language teachers bring such historical knowledge directly into the language classroom. Historians of the Spanish language can approach the subject matter from the mutually complementary perspectives of internal and external history. The former, known as historical grammar (gramática histórica), involves the description and analysis of the changes in the phonology, morphology, and syntax that mark the evolution from spoken Latin to medieval or modern Spanish. In contrast, external history (historia de la lengua), examines the development over time of the language against the relevant historical, political, social and cultural background. It tends to emphasize the history of the Spanish lexicon, especially borrowings from the languages with which the Latin-Spanish continuum has come into contact over its history. The traditional exemplar of this approach has long been the various editions of Rafael Lapesa’s venerable Historia de la lengua española. Readers can now profitably consult the chapters in the collective Historia de la lengua española, coordinated by Rafael Cano Aguilar. In her book, Torrens Álvarez has chosen to present both the internal and external history of Spanish. Given its pedagogical goal, this book makes no claim to be an original contribution to our knowledge of the history of the Spanish language. Rather, it offers its intended audience a clear summary of selected features of the internal and external history of Spanish, based on the contents of the standard manuals and works on Spanish historical grammar and language history identified in her bibliography (303–09). The first part, “Evolución de la lengua española”, comprises nine chapters. After a brief introduction to the goals and the structure of the book, Torrens Álvarez offers an overview of some key notions concerning the nature of language change and a survey of relevant processes of phonetic change. The author devotes the next two chapters to sound changes in the passage from Latin to Spanish. After describing the key differences between the vowel systems as preserved in classical Latin and the stage she labels latín tardío (without specifying this term’s chronological limits), namely the loss of vowel quantity and the development of an accent of intensity, the [End Page 377] author presents the evolution of the individual vowel phonemes. She follows the traditional practice of studying separately stressed and unstressed vowels, with particular attention to the diphthongization of the stressed open-mid vowels, to the vowel-raising provoked by a nearby palatal, and the apocope...

The triumph of heavy military equipment in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Castile

From the perspective of the types of weapons used in the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, this conflict cannot be considered a turning point in medieval Spanish history. Neither written sources nor the few archaeological surface findings from the battlefield indicate the use of innovative weaponry that might itself provide evidence for a major change. In the current state of the question, the types of weapons used in the battle must be inferred from the evolutionary process already observed in Castile and al-Andalus during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Our current knowledge is confined to information provided by iconographic and literary sources, as the archaeology is too limited to support or challenge them.

Los contextos de fundación de las iglesias tardoantiguas en Galicia (ss. V-VIII): substratos arqueológicos, distribución y significados

This paper aims to analyze and discuss the different spatial contexts in which churches were founded in Galicia (Northwest Spain) between the 5thand the 8thcentury. This is a topic with great potential, but scarcely studied so far by Spanish historians, since texts offer very little evidences about the specific contexts of foundation, and material data have almost only been approached from perspectives of traditional archaeology or history of art. The present work aims to explore these spatial contexts of Galician churches foundation from a catalogue of 50 possible Late Antique ecclesiastical buildings, based both on archaological works and stilistic-typological approaches. Although some of the data are still problematic, interesting ideas relating distribution and archaeological substrates can be observed in the general corpus. Following these premises, in the first part it is discussed the wider geographical frame of church foundation, mainly the distribution of evidences in relation to different Galician environments and Late Antique territorial articulation. So, it is observed an important relationship between evidences of churches and Roman-Late Roman dynamic axis and areas in Galicia. The second part analyzes the relation of the evidences with their archaeological substrates and discusses different evolutions from Roman to Medieval uses, which are not always lineal. This means dealing with the concepts of continuity-break and pragmatical-symbolical reuse, and it will be discussed here whether material techniques are reliable indicators of socioeconomical development. In the third part some proposals regarding different historical and geographical contexts for church foundation in Late Antique and Early Medieval Galicia are presented. Complexity and variety in cases are likely to be bigger than usually thought and approaches such as the study of building techniques can be, in the future, a powerful indicator to solve some problems. In general, in spite of many limits, Late Antique foundation of churches in Galicia, show similar characteristics to other Western European regions.

Local Disciplines, Local Cultures: Praise and Criticism in British and Spanish History Book Reviews

The use of a critical voice in book reviews seems to depend on factors rooted in the discipline community reviewers belong to and on the language and culture which hosts the review. Adopting a cross-cultural perspective, this study analyses 60 book reviews from British and Spanish history journals in terms of the entities and aspects evaluated and the polarity (positive/negative) of the evaluation. Divergences are found in the distribution of positive and negative evaluation, revealing that even if in both cultures positive evaluation is more frequent, in Spanish book reviews negative evaluation is almost nonexistent. Interviews with informants show that these divergences respond to the local character of the disciplinary communities which host the reviews and to a different understanding of what this evaluative genre implies. 1

Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines? Essays on Ethnicity, Identity, and Diaspora (review)

Reviewed by: Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines? Essays on Ethnicity, Identity, and Diaspora Beatrice D. Gurwitz Raanan Rein . Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines? Essays on Ethnicity, Identity, and Diaspora, Leiden: Brill, 2010. Pp. 286. Paper $152.46. ISBN 9004179135. In the preface to this collection of essays, Raanan Rein describes a Passover Seder he attended in Buenos Aires a few years back. The Jewish-Argentine guests ate traditional Ashkenazi and Argentine fare and sang holiday songs in "broken Hebrew," all the while sneaking glances at the soccer game that played in the background. This anecdote, and other similar ones, aptly set the stage for a book that calls attention to the hybridity of Jewish and Argentine identities. With a thorough survey of the extant literature, and a thoughtful analysis of the trajectory of the field over the past fifty years, Rein argues that the literature to date on "Latin American Jewry" has generally over-emphasized the Jewish identity at the expense of the Latin American. The pioneers of the field were generally Israeli scholars, who lacked understandings of the broader Latin American context and focused mostly on anti-Semitism, the growth of Zionism, and Israeli-Latin American relations. In this book and in a collaborative work with Jeffrey Lesser, Rein proposes a renovation of the field that starts with viewing the population in question as Jewish-Latin American to stress "national identity without denying the possibility of a Diasporic identity" (3). Rein identifies promising developments in this regard. In the last twenty years Latin Americanists, trained as historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, have turned their attention to the Jewish experience in the continent. Rein is a prime example: he is an Israeli historian whose earliest work considered modern Argentine and Spanish history, but he has now researched and written extensively on Jewish Argentines. In the first essay Rein calls on his growing number of colleagues to recognize that Jewish communities, like other Latin American ethnic groups, are internally diverse and part of broader national stories. He rejects Jewish essentialism, an overemphasis on anti-Semitism, and the assumption that Jews are unbendingly loyal to Israel. In addition, he calls for a consideration of the experience and identities of those Latin [End Page 133] Americans who have made Aliya. He is also hopeful that his proposals might inspire a renaissance in studies of Latin America's many other ethnic groups. The subsequent essays are focused on the Jewish-Argentine community and fulfill many of his goals. They are ordered chronologically, spanning the twentieth century. In every case, he describes the political and social context with great detail so as to explain Jewish actions and identities. The essays are all meticulously researched, reflecting an exhaustive reading of the secondary literature and of various primary sources including governmental documents, diplomatic records, memoirs, oral histories, and American, Israeli, Argentine, and Jewish-Argentine press. In several essays Rein tackles the assumption that Jewish Argentines were perpetually burdened by anti-Semitism—as he must to establish that Jews have felt quite attached to the Argentine nation. Those who claim pervasive anti-Semitism in Argentina often point to the nation's neutrality during World War II and the entrance of Nazi war criminals after the War. Rein makes good use of his expertise in foreign relations and the Peronist regime to debunk these assumptions. While there were some Nazi sympathizers in circles of power during the war, the nation's neutrality was primarily rooted in economic interests and a rejection of United States hegemony. Similarly, the portrayal of Argentina as a safe-haven for Nazis after the War has been overblown due to the notoriety of Eichmann and Mengele. Rein also emphasizes that the relationship between the local Jewish community and Perón was not as hostile as often portrayed. Many Jews were ardent Peronists even if the majority of Jews were not. Nonetheless, Jewish institutions worked diligently to erase the history of any friendly relations when the political winds changed after Perón's overthrow. Rein also considers how the negotiation of Jewish and Argentine identities changed over time. He offers a close reading of a Zionist periodical published in the 1920s and 1930s by wealthy Sephardi Jews...

The Biblical Ruth as Dama Principal: Tirso’s La mejor espigadera

The comedia mined a variety of source texts for its plots—Italian novelle, Spanish history, Greek and Roman mythology, and, of course, the Bible—but always managed to adapt plot, setting, and characters to the conventions of the Spanish national theater. This process offered great benefits, such as audience familiarity, as well as challenges, including inherent and unavoidable limitations on artistic freedom. One of the more interesting adaptations is Tirso de Molina’s reworking of the Biblical story of Ruth in La mejor espigadera , primarily because of the lack of dramatic potential offered by the original: there are no villains, no obstacles that appear to be insurmountable, no internal conflicts that any of the principal characters must resolve. Indeed, the Biblical characters are for the most part rather one-dimensional and exceedingly virtuous. This study focuses on the central figure of Ruth and her transformation from young, simple Moabite to a leading lady with much in common with other damas principales . Tirso’s techniques—elevating Ruth to nobility, describing her in conventional poetic terms, creation of a love triangle, even recasting her as a strong-willed, intelligent, and competent woman who does not submit meekly to the wishes of others—not only provide the audience with a different interpretation of this righteous woman of the Hebrew Bible, but also reveal a great deal about seventeenth-century Spanish views of women and the art of comedia dramaturgy as well. In the end, Tirso does not just demonstrate the Baroque aspiration to imitate its models with the goal of surpassing them, he makes the case that the comedia as a genre should take second place to nothing, not even to the Holy Bible.

On Western Waters: Anglo-American Nonfictional Narrative in the Nineteenth Century

Anglo-American westward expansion provided a major impulse to the development of the young United States' narrative tradition. Early U.S. writers also looked to the South, that is, to the Spanish New World and, in some cases, to Spain itself. Washington Irving's “A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus” (1828), the first full-length biography of the admiral in English, inaugurated the trend, and Mark Twain's “Life on the Mississippi” (1883) transformed it by focusing on the life and lives of the Mississippi River Valley and using an approach informed by Miguel de Cervantes's “Don Quijote de la Mancha.” From Irving's “discovery of America” to Twain's tribute to the disappearing era of steamboat travel and commerce on the Mississippi, the tales about “western waters,” told via their authors' varied engagements with Spanish history and literature, constitute a seldom acknowledged dimension in Anglo-America's nonfictional narrative literary history.

Épica y Nación en Pérez-Reverte y Galdós

Post-Franco Spanish intellectual and political discourse is engaged in a process of rewriting past national history to connect it with contemporary cultural parameters. The work of Arturo Pérez-Reverte revisits segments of the past that the author views as an ethical inspiration for the present. Un día de cólera provides an illustration, in relation to the popular rebellion against the French occupiers on 2 May 1808. This article studies the ramifications of this epic approach to the past. Benito Pérez Galdós's view of Spanish history is more relativistic and skeptical. In his novel Trafalgar, the battle of Trafalgar is viewed not as an occasion for national exaltation but as a defeat of the objectives of modernity—based on Emmanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace—that focused on the extinction of war and the utopian creation of a universal humanity.

The Visigoths in History and Legend, by J.N. Hillgarth

It is a heartening thought for early medieval historians that the last of the kings of ‘the Goths, the Sueves and the Vandals’ died less than forty years ago. This is despite the fact that the peoples normally associated with those names vanish from historiographical view at various points between the sixth and early eighth centuries. Until the accession in 1973 of King Carl XVI Gustaf, who finally renounced the titles, their memory was constitutionally better preserved in Sweden, their entirely legendary place of origin, than in the Iberian Peninsula, where their actual kingdoms had once existed. While the Sueves and Vandals had been eliminated long before, any chance of a new common Gothic identity being fully absorbed by the social élites of what we call the Visigothic kingdom in Spain was destroyed by the Arab conquest of 711. At a practical level, the descendants of those who, prior to 711, may have thought of themselves as Goths were, after that date, no longer under the authority of a single monarchy. Some were ruled by Muslim amirs and then caliphs; others lived under Christian monarchs in the north, none of whom was able to call themselves king of (all) the Goths. In any case, they might not have wished so to do, as another legacy of the conquest was the need to understand why God had permitted it to happen, and here the sins, real and imaginary, of the last kings of the old Visigothic realm became the most favoured explanation. On the other hand, the legal, literary, religious and other cultural inheritances of the former kingdom conditioned most aspects of the life and thought of the Christian communities of Spain after 711, even of those under Muslim rule. So, there remained a tension, never fully resolved over succeeding centuries, between the positive and the negative aspects of the memory of the Goths. Even in modern times, influential Spanish historians continued to criticise the Visigothic kingdom for its supposed decadence and moral decline, while General Franco praised it as the source of Spaniards’ well-known ‘love of law and order’.