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If at the time events occur a good part of them are already the subject of opposing interpretations, what cannot happen when past events are valued? In those cases the controversies can be even more bitter.
Did Spain have colonies? Some statements by the Minister of Culture Ernest Urtasun that we must “overcome the colonial framework of museums” have unleashed a controversy about the past of the Spanish empire and its supposed black legend. Some sectors of historiography deny that Spain had colonies because the possessions had another status and, in their opinion, were not subject to repression or stark exploitation. Who has the reason?
The fall of Barcelona. For some, the entry of the nationals into Barcelona was the conquest of the city by usurpers, for others it was a liberation – in the form, of course, of a dictatorship. Even within the Republican side things were not seen in a monolithic way. This was the fall of the Catalan capital and the collapse of the Republic.
The role of the dictator. Frank Dikötter, professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, has just published Dictators, a book in which he delves into the mechanics of the personality cult of authoritarian leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu or Mao. A strategy that made many consider dictators as demigods; others, however, saw them as monsters. Of course, they were all, in Dikötter’s words, “great actors.”
The other side of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution, whose first steps began in the times of the Enlightenment, is seen from our perspective as a great leap for human progress that has allowed societies to reach the current level of well-being. But these changes have another side, that of exploitation and development driven, in reality, by the need to produce weapons for the expanding British empire.
Rise and fall of Eiffel. Today it may seem incredible, but in its day the Eiffel Tower, currently converted into a symbol of the French capital, was the subject of bitter controversy. Finally, however, the vision of this work as a monument to the technological progress that catapulted the career of its creator prevailed. However, a subsequent judicial scandal ended Gustave Eiffel’s fame. Everything, in the History and Life podcast.
Who died in the French Revolution? The French Revolution still reverberates in European consciences, but often in a distorted way. The famous revolutionary executions, for example, resulted in many more commoner victims than those among the nobility. “More carters were executed than princes, more day laborers than dukes and marquises,” according to historian Donald Greer. The article, in the Spanish version of The Conversation.
The letters of ‘The Nymph’. Between the 17th and 18th centuries, British ships captured hundreds of ships from competing maritime powers and the thousands of documents they transported are still preserved. The researcher Alejandro Salamanca has just published the analysis of the shipment of letters from the Spanish ship La Ninfa. These letters, often written between family or friends, offer a unique insight into what emigration to America was like in the 18th century. (in English)
Body snatchers. The macabre case of the plot to sell corpses to universities in Valencia, known this week, refers directly to an illegal practice abundantly documented between the 16th and 19th centuries and which today could seem completely eradicated. But this is not the case: this Monday the existence of a criminal network was made public in a funeral home that, instead of burying some of the deceased, had sold mortal remains for study in medical schools.
Much of the historical news about thefts of this type dates back almost two centuries and falls within the Anglo-Saxon world. The lack of bodies available for university teaching or research, at a time of great demand as medicine advanced by leaps and bounds, fostered a lucrative business from the illegal exhumation of recently dead individuals. The fresher the corpse, the more valued it was.
The phenomenon, especially documented in the US and the United Kingdom, moved to the field of literary fiction and was recreated by writers such as Dickens, Lovecraft, Poe and Stevenson. The latter wrote the story The Body Snatcher, which was made into a film in the 1940s. It is difficult, on the other hand, not to find points of connection between the underworld of the resurrectionists and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).
But in reality, the practice was not new. When the doctor Andrés Vesalius (1514-1564) revolutionized modern anatomy with public dissections, the shortage of bodies for the study of an expanding discipline soon became evident. It has been said of Vesalius himself that he had resorted to theft of corpses, which would not have been strange because it was a relatively frequent practice. They were different times.
