As many of you might already know, the Boise Basque Museum and Cultural Center, with help from the Basque Government, has been working on a project to highlight the Basques’ contributions to the history and settlement of the United States. I’ve received a number of recent messages updating me on the status of the project, […]
A couple of links I’ve been sent or found in wanderings of the web. First, Louis Arriaga Jr has a fascinating story of misunderstandings and miscarriage of justice (even one of the sentencing judges felt this way, but couldn’t do anything about it). Clearly, Arriaga is of Basque descent, though his connections to Spain are […]
Pedro Oiarzabal, a newly minted researcher at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, has spent his young career focused on issues of Basque identity around the world. His newest book is Gardeners of Identity: Basques in the San Francisco Bay Area, published by the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. (Incidentally, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Miguel Ocamica, the son of Ramon, a good friend of my dad’s who was one of the chorizo crew I posted about a while back, is trying to gather the Ocamicas of the world together. The goal is to establish a family tree of some sort between all the Ocamicas of the world. To facilitate […]
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 […]
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 […]
