Our daughter is growing up fast and it was time to upgrade her bike. We stopped at the local bike shop (Sirius Cycles, owned by this great guy from Panama who is one of the few people I have met that has known a Blas…) They are a small shop, but with a lot of […]
Last week, while visiting the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, for a kick-off meeting for a new project, we visited the Department of Nuclear Engineering. Nuclear Engineering is housed in Etcheverry Hall, clearly named after a Basque. It turns out that Bernard A. Etcheverry was a professor of irrigation and drainage during 1915-1951. […]
During the Christmas holiday, which we spent in and around Boise visiting grandparents, we made a stop at the Basque Museum and Cultural Center. After making our yearly pass through the gift shop, we took a stroll through the museum itself and found the newest exhibit on Basques in the military. The goal is to […]
A lot of the men that came to the United States were barely more than boys. Suddenly, they found themselves alone in the hills of west, tending herds of sheep with little more company than their dog. It’s no surprise, then, that many of them left their signature behind. Tagging the trees like urban kids […]
In July, I was on a business trip in Versailles, France, and the hosts took us on a tour of the palace and the Jeu de Paume Room. Jeu de Paume is a game where players played a form of handball and tennis. The court at Versailles is famous because the French deputies of the […]
It has been widely reported and assumed that the Basque language played an important role in the US activities in World War II. I even have a page about this here. However, as Pedro Oiarzabal and Guillermo Tabernilla find, this is myth of Basque history. Myth debunked: No such thing as “Basque code talkers” By Pedro […]
Relatively, as compared to the other peoples of Europe, the Basques converted to Christianity rather late. While Christianity seems to arrived in the region in the 4th or 5th centuries, it didn’t really take hold amongst the population until roughly the 12th or 13th centuries (Wikipedia has a summary of what is known and debated […]
The big news out of the Basque Country is that ETA, Euskadi ta Askatasuna, who had declared a ceasefire in 2011, has officially disarmed. ETA grew out of the resistance to Franco’s dictatorship and disaffection with the economic and political realities of the late 1950s. They changed the political course of Spain when they assassinated Luis […]
When I first started this site, one of the first things I added was Charley Shaffer’s list of Basque restaurants in the US. Charley simply loved Basque-American food, particularly the family style dining that was typical of restaurants in the US west. As he describes in his introduction to his list: Meals are typically served family […]
Eighty years ago, Spain was mired in a civil war that pitted the Republican government and its allies against the Nationalist forces of Franco. As Franco’s forces gained ground in the Basque Country, thousands of people, mostly children, fled to other lands, becoming refugees. Britain alone took nearly 4000 children. This is the story of […]
