There is a pathetic side to the vanishing from the list of great powers of the Nation that at one time was the most powerful in the world. Time was when Spain’s flag waved from every Continent, and Philip II was the most famous conqueror of his day. It was the Emperor Charles V who […]

Spain comes before us in brilliant guise as the greatest power in Europe during most of the Sixteenth Century. She had become a compact State under Ferdinand and Isabella at the end of the Fifteenth Century. Soon after the discovery of America Spain became the possessor of a new Empire beyond the Atlantic. Between 1519 […]

The peninsula which Spain and Portugal divide between them is the part of western Europe least visited by Americans, although it stretches out like a friendly hand toward the western hemisphere and has furnished not only the discoverer of North America, but the colonizers of Central and South America. When, early last June, we attempted […]

THE sixteenth century dawned auspiciously for Spain. After eight hundred years of warfare with the infidel usurpers of the Peninsula, the last Moslem stronghold had fallen; and, through the union of Aragon and Castile, all Spain was united under one crown and lifted to the peak of power in Europe. To the world about her, […]

ALVAR NU EZ CABEZA DE VACA, now a castaway on “Malhado” Island, on the wild coast of Texas, was a noble of old lineage. He had relinquished high official position in Spain to join Narvâez in his -adventure. Of the disaster and its remarkable sequel Vaca wrote a circumstantial account which enables us to get […]

MEANWHILE other Spanish explorers were trying to pierce the Northern Mystery by way of the Pacific slope. West as well as east, and somewhere in the north, must lie the waters of the Strait of Anian, that direct passage from the Atlantic to China, if indeed the northwestern territory did not actually abut on Asia. […]

INDEPENDENCE without liberty and statehood without respect for law are phrases which sum up the situation in Spanish America after the failure of Bolivar’s “great design.” The outcome was a collection of crude republics, racked by internal dissension and torn by mutual jealousy patrias bobas, or “foolish fatherlands,” as one of their own writers has […]

APART from the spoliation of Mexico by the United States, the independence of the Hispanic nations had not been menaced for more than thirty years. Now comes a period in which the plight of their big northern neighbor, rent in twain by civil war and powerless to enforce the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine, caused […]

DURING the half century that had elapsed since 1826, the nations of Hispanic America had passed through dark ages. Their evolution had always been accompanied by growing pains and had at times been arrested altogether or unduly hastened by harsh injections of radicalism. It was not an orderly development through gradual, modifications in the social […]

AT the time of the American Revolution most of the New World still belonged to Spain and Portugal, whose captains and conquerors had been the first to come to its shores. Spain had the lion’s share, but Portugal held Brazil, in itself a vast land of unsuspected resources. No empire man-kind had ever yet known […]