Category Archives: History

Commemoration of the bombing of Gernika amongst the Basque diaspora

I received this request for assistance from Daniel Clarke, who needs help researching how the diaspora commemorated the bombing of Gernika.  Feel free to write Daniel directly or to post your comments here. Dear all, I am a student at the University of Cambridge, England, working as part of a project looking at memory, heritage […]

The King’s Way

Jon Zuazo, a friend of mine in Munitibar, Bizkaia, just finished renovating his family’s ancestral baserri, Aixabide. He has taken pains to use as much of the original wood as possible, beams that are literally hundreds of years old. In showing me his house, he recounted some of the history, a history that I found […]

Christine Bender: Perils and Hardships Unimaginable

A historian’s greatest challenge is to convey the excitement and drama of history.  This is especially true for more obscure subjects, as the reader doesn’t already come with some emotional attachment.  But this is exactly where Christine Bender excels.  By using fiction as her vehicle to explore historical events, Christine is able to delve into […]

Blogging about Basques in America

Koldo San Sebastian is a journalist and writer who has spent his career working in various media on themes of Basque history, including a television documentary on the Spanish Civil War in Euskadi, a book on the history of the Basque Nationalist Party, and another on the Basque exile in America. Koldo is currently writing […]

Euskal Kazeta — Basque News

To Basques in the US, Nancy Zubiri is well known.  Author of A Travel Guide to Basque America, there is probably no one who knows better both the current landscape of Basque America or how that landscape came to be.  Thus, it is very fitting that Nancy has just launched a new project, an online […]

Sails of Fortune by Christine Echeverria Bender

Having read Laurence Bergreen’s description of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, Over the Edge of the World (see this post), I was very interested in Christine Echeverria Bender’s take of the same voyage, Sails of Fortune, partially because I found Bergreen’s account so fascinating, but also because I knew Bender’s would cast a more favorable […]

Over the Edge of the World by Laurence Bergreen

I originally wrote these thoughts in August of 2005 and thought I’d posted them here, but just realized I hadn’t.  In looking back, there are clearly some errors in what I wrote, which I’ve corrected. Over the Edge of the World, by Laurence Bergreen, tells the story of the first voyage around the world, the […]

Idaho Oregon Nevada Heritage Museum

Sheep were a big business in southwest Idaho/eastern Oregon/northern Nevada.  As a result, a lot of Basques settled in the high desert of the area.  Sheep brought my dad and my mom’s grandparents to America.  My mom’s aitxitxa, Blas Telleria, and amuma, Ines Eiguren, both settled in Jordan Valley, OR, a small town just on […]

Link dump

I’ve been meaning to share this set of links for a while and just thought I’d “dump” them on you before I either forget or they get outdated. 🙂 Last.fm, an online music station of sorts, has a channel dedicated to Kortatu and similar artists. I haven’t spent a lot of time with it yet, […]