Tag: Spanish

Spain’s Civil War and the Americans who fought in it: a convoluted legacy

Reading time: 9 minutes
Though the Spanish war did pit Spaniard against Spaniard, the conflict quickly became international. Within days of the onset of the coup, Hitler and Mussolini intervened on the side of the insurgent generals. Before long, the Soviet Union would come to the aid of the Loyalists, also known as the Republican forces, who supported the government.

Read More

Spain’s new memory law dredges up a painful chapter of Spain’s often forgotten ties to Nazis

Reading time: 6 minutes
In October 2022, Spain’s current progressive government approved a new law – called the Democratic Memory Law – that recognizes Spaniards who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis.

Among other measures, the law will create a census and a national DNA bank to help people identify the thousands of Spaniards who were killed during World War II.

Read More

New archaeology finding shows how Muslim cuisine endured in secret despite policing by the Spanish Catholic regime

Reading time: 5 minutes
Granada, in southern Spain’s Andalusia region, was the final remnant of Islamic Iberia known as al-Andalus – a territory that once stretched across most of Spain and Portugal. In 1492, the city fell to the Catholic conquest.

In the aftermath, native Andalusians, who were Muslims, were permitted to continue practising their religion. But after a decade of increasingly hostile religious policing from the new Catholic regime, practising Islamic traditions and rituals was outlawed. Recent archaeological excavations in Granada, however, have uncovered evidence of Muslim food practices continuing in secret for decades after the conquest.

Read More

How the Thirty Years’ War Weakened Spain

Reading time: 5 minutes
The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) wasn’t a conflict as much as a vortex that sucked every major European power into it only to spit them out battered and bruised a few years later. We have talked about how it started in Prague and how Sweden got involved; in this article, it’s Spain’s turn.

Read More

100 years later, why don’t we commemorate the victims and heroes of ‘Spanish flu’?

Reading time: 5 minutes
ous Rookwood Cemetery, a lichen-spotted headstone captures a family’s double burden of grief.
he grave contains the remains of 19-year-old Harriet Ann Ottaway, who died on 2 July 1919. Its monument also commemorates her brother Henry James Ottaway, who “died of wounds in Belgium, 23rd Sept 1917, aged 21 years”.

Read More
Loading