Search results

Abstract: This article explores the ways in which historians have thought about biography as a genre of writing about the past and how these attitudes have changed over the last fifty years or so, from skepticism and even hostility to increasing acceptance and even advocacy. It also examines some of the ways in which biography itself has evolved and the contribution of historians to this evolution, before concluding with an example from the author's forthcoming biography of the 19th-century Spanish military and political figure Baldomero Espartero (1793-1879).

This article argues that Baldomero Espartero remained widely famous and popular for decades after the end of his active political career and his political failures. While the initial Espartero cult was created from above following his heroic victory at Lu-chana and consolidated after the Embrace of Vergara, the maintenance of the cult through the 1860s was largely driven from below. The article uses a range of sources: oral and family traditions, cheap books and images and, above all letters written to Espartero, to explore what was the first case of modern political celebrity in Spain. ; Este artículo sostiene que Baldomero Espartero era muy famoso y popular décadas después del final de su carrera política activa. Mientras que el culto original de Espartero fue creado desde arriba después de su victoria en Luchana y se consolidó con el Abrazo de Vergara, el mantenimiento del mismo durante la década de 1860 tuvo una naturaleza eminentemente popular. Este artículo usa varios tipos de fuentes como las orales, tradiciones familiares, canciones y nanas, libros e imágenes en ediciones populares y, sobre todo, cartas escritas a Espartero. Todas ellas ayudan a explicar el que fue el primer caso de celebridad política en España.

Historians of modern Europe have lately become interested in hero cults and what they can reveal about the construction of national identities. This interest has begun to move beyond studies located in individual states to examine this aspect of the politics of the past within a European rather than a purely national context. This article rep­resents an initial effort to explore hero cults in an even broader frame by considering a European woman warrior and national hero, the Spaniard Agustina de Aragón, in comparative perspective. Taking Lakshmi Bai and Jhalkari Bai, two women warriors and heroes from India's First War of Independence in 1857, as the point of departure, the article compares the ways in which the figure of Agustina de Aragón has been rep­resented and used since her act of heroism against Napoleon in 1808. This comparison of hero cults in a European and a non-European country can potentially be a first step toward development of a globalized perspective on the politics of the past.

Military intervention in politics has been a constant factor in Spanish history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The nature of intervention has varied and it can be divided into three distinct periods: 1814 to 1875; 1923 to 1939; and 1976 to the present. The armed forces which emerged from the Franco regime were dominated by an antidemocratic ideology, born of civil war and preserved through the military's isolation from society at large. They have neither fully supported nor wholly rejected the democratic system created by the transition which followed the death of Francisco Franco (in November 1975); they have been a source of perpetual concern. The first governments of the democracy did not take measures to resolve this situation. The socialist government elected in October 1982 has inherited the problem and is aware of the types of major changes needed to solve it.