Andrew Imbrie— Imagine a country laid low by foreign wars, ravaged by plague, and weakened by political dysfunction, economic recession, and multiple bankruptcies. Instead of preparing for the future, its leaders engage in fierce disputes over the balance of trade, wage bitter debates over religion and immigration, and stoke tensions
Sylvia Sellers-Garcia— In 1805, a young woman in Guatemala City went in search of a priest. The woman, Justa Flores, was twenty-one years old; the priest, Father Calderón, was to be the godfather of her five-month-old son. She found him at a friend’s house, and there Justa was persuaded to stay
Harry Kelsey— The men who sailed for Spain in the sixteenth century were descended from a long line of veterans who had served in the armies of Leon and Castile during several centuries of warfare against Moorish invaders. Battle-hardened and confident, these men of Spain journeyed westward, looking for the
Ivan Lett For many Britons, there is a certain long-standing fascination with Spain. In the early colonial and modern periods, the great Spanish empire was a Catholic rival to newly-Protestant English prowess on the seas, culminating in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. So quickly after its rise