Spanish Archives

The Blue Division: Franco’s Soldiers on the Eastern Front

by History Guild | Apr 9, 2024 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 12 minutes
From 1939 to 1945, scarcely one of the 99 countries on Earth went untouched. Just 14 nations remained neutral throughout the Second World War, and even those couldn’t completely escape the gravity well of war.
Nor did they all want to. A prelude to the European war – bloody, massive, and unspeakably destructive – had played out in Spain from 1936 until just a few months before Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939.

500 years after Ferdinand Magellan landed in Patagonia, there’s nothing to celebrate for its indigenous peoples

by History Guild | Feb 19, 2024 | Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
Five hundred years ago, on March 31 1520, the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan began a sojourn in a part of South America that has been known as Patagonia ever since. Magellan’s five-month long overwinter in a natural harbour that has become known as Puerto San Julián was part of the first circumnavigation of the globe.

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

by History Guild | Jul 17, 2023 | Military History, Political and Economic History | 0

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.

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

by History Guild | Jun 12, 2023 | History News, Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

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.

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

by History Guild | Apr 17, 2023 | Social and Cultural History | 0

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.

How the Thirty Years’ War Weakened Spain

by History Guild | Aug 15, 2022 | Military History | 0

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.

Extraordinarily, the effects of the Spanish Inquisition linger to this day

by History Guild | May 26, 2022 | Political and Economic History | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
From Imperial Rome to the Crusades, to modern North Korea or the treatment of Rohingya in Myanmar, religious persecution has been a tool of state control for millennia.

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

by History Guild | Jan 11, 2022 | Social and Cultural History | 0

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”.