Chanel Cleeton’s novel The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba appeared in 2021. It’s the first book by Cleeton that I’ve read, so I was hoping to find a new author to follow. The title and cover of The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba are a little misleading, however. The cover features a woman in a […]
Tag: Spain
The First Slaves in Virginia – 1619 as a Tragic Year in America
While it’s never fun to look at the unfortunate truths of a nation’s past, unfortunate events are often important ones. The first slaves in Virginia are a great example of this. When they arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619, life in colonial Virginia changed. Some of the changes took time, as we’ll see, but […]
The Bombing of Guernica – What Was Its Meaning & Importance?
World War 2 remains notorious for the frequency of bombs used during the conflict. Bombs, conventional and atomic, blasted places like Hiroshima, London, Tokyo, and many cities in Germany. Because of the horror and scale of the damage, these places overshadow, to some extent, what happened in the Spanish town of Guernica on April 26 […]
Who Was Bartolome de las Casas and Why Does He Matter?
Asking who was Bartolome de las Casas would be an easy question for an educated person in Spain. Here in the US, however, people are much less likely to know who de las Casas was. But they should. Bartolome de las Casas is a famous and important historical figure. He features prominently in the history […]
American Concentration Camps in the Philippines – The Brutal History
This post is not, as you might expect, about Americans in World War 2. Although that war did indeed feature concentration camps in the Philippines for captured Americans. Run by the Japanese, they were brutal places. They are also worth learning about. Instead, though, today I mean to describe the American concentration camps in the […]
Malaria and Sugar in the Caribbean
My last blog entry began the story of how sugar, malaria, and the Columbian Exchange resulted in the living hell of slavery flourishing in the Caribbean. I described the economic reasons why this took place. Today we’ll examine some more implications of this development. It involves the combination of malaria and sugar. To read previous […]