Best spain & portugal historical biographies according to redditors

We found 43 Reddit comments discussing the best spain & portugal historical biographies. We ranked the 12 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

Next page

Top Reddit comments about Historical Spain & Portugal Biographies:

u/jbmass · 13 pointsr/polandball

I read this book a year ago: https://www.amazon.com/Over-Edge-World-Terrifying-Circumnavigation/dp/006093638X

About Magellan and his travels in Latin America and then in the Pacific. The dude was a literal psycho.

u/MetalSeagull · 9 pointsr/ifyoulikeblank

Try Krakauer's other well known book Into Thin Air, and because there's some controversy regarding his version of events, also The Climb by Anatoli Boukreev who was a major player that day.

Krakauer's other book Under the Banner of Heaven is a good "true crime" style story about some Morman murders, but may not be enough like Into the Wild to appeal to you.

Over the Edge of the World is more of a history, covering Magellan's circumnavigation of the earth. It was facinating and definately had intrigue, machinations, and survival elements.

Another book on exploration and survival, Endurance: Shakleton's Incredible Voyage

And another one, Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson. I think this is the one I read, but I can't be certain. It doesn't seem to be as well regarded, but i thought it was still interesting.

A book on diving and survival: The Last Dive, Chowdhury

The Hot Zone could be thought of as science survival. Anyway, you'll probably love the opening bits in Africa, although it does slow way down after that.

Far away from survival, but still about travel are the wonderful Bill Bryson's travelogues. Witty and informative. In a Sunburned Country and A Walk in the Woods are particularly recommended.


u/calvinwithhobbes · 7 pointsr/history

Catalina De Erauso. Born in the late sixteenth century in Spain, she spent most of her youth at a nunnery before escaping as a teenager. She then disguised herself as a boy and stowed away on a ship the Americas. She continued to live as a man for decades in South America: getting in frequent gambling fights, was sentenced to death several times, and made the rank of Lieutenant in the Spanish military. Much of De Erauso's story is tragic (killing her own brother in a duel, for example). But, upon returning to Europe, De Erauso had a brief audience with the Pope, who allowed De Erauso to continue living as a man.

​

Catalina's memoir:

https://www.amazon.com/Lieutenant-Nun-Memoir-Basque-Transvestite/dp/0807070734/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=catalina+de+erauso&qid=1558678556&s=gateway&sr=8-1

u/Gaimar · 7 pointsr/AskHistorians

A meaningful step in the construction of any identity is historical recovery—the finding of people in the past who can be considered similar. So, I'm sympathetic toward Feinberg's efforts, although I think there are significant problems that should preclude taking her claims at face value.

Feinberg's charge, that Joan of Arc was burned for dressing like a man, has the virtue of being sort of technically correct whilst misunderstanding the context in which that charge was issued. The records for Joan's trial are readily available online in English translation, although it should be noted that I believe the text comes only from a single manuscript originally in Latin. Like most inquisitorial transcripts, responses are truncated into often formulaic sentences that make it easy for the scribe to keep pace with the events. The essentials are as follows. After being brought to Rouen, Joan was tried as a heretic and, after a lengthy trial (spanning from February to May), was found guilty of both wearing men's dress and claiming to be responsible only to God. She signed a confession to this effect, but just a few days letter she returned to male dress, claiming that she did so on account of voices only she could hear. In terms of inquisitorial, legal procedure this was the equivalent of a knockout blow, for she had not only relapsed against the accordances of her signed confession—an act with significant legal consequences—, but the mention of the voices opened her up to the additional charge of idolatry. There was, to my knowledge, no charge of transvestitism, mostly because such phenomenon as we understand it would have been inconceivable to those present in Rouen, Joan included. The act of relapse was enough for the clerical adjudicators to hand her over to secular authorities for punishment.

This is not to suggest that there were not larger factors in play. The inquisitors hardly could claim to be ignorant of the larger stakes between the French and the English; it was, after all, Joan who had held the banner behind Charles VII as he was crowned at Rheims. It is also likely they would of at least been aware of her larger reputation, the deeds done at Orléans and in the course of Charles's subsequent march across northern France. Putting the political context aside, the later middle ages also saw a rise in tension between the papacy at Rome and populist religious figures and practices. A particular point of contention were female religious figures, who came under increasing scrutiny as their reputation for sanctity spread. All of this surely played a part in the outcome of Joan's fate.

As a historian reading this pamphlet for the first time, I must comment that I think Feinberg talks about history in some troubling ways. Her language reminds me of someone who has read a fair amount of marxist literature concerning the topic, but little else. You can see the fingerprints of this on her thinking with phrases such as "social soil", the arrogant French "feudal class," and "counter-revolutionary terror by the land-owning class." She invokes the Jacquerie, for example, as a contemporary revolution that was "shaking European feudalism root and branch," despite the fact that the Jacquerie was neither a revolution, nor contemporary to Joan, happening about eighty years before she showed up in Orléans. These inconsistencies would seem to push further than the point you made in asking your question: Feinburg willfully bends and distorts the past.

This is frustrating, because there is no reason to reimagine Joan in this way: we have remarkable records of people who lived lives much closer to our definition of trans than Joan. The sixteenth-century Catalina de Erauso is one such example. Catalina escaped a clositer and traveled to the Spanish new world, where she adventured through the blood-soaked streets swindling fellow Spainards at cards, brawling for honor, and romancing ladies as any Spaniard cavalier of the time would. She does this for several years before a series of events bring her back to Europe, where she confronts Church and Pope in a very different way than you would expect. You can pick up her autobiography on Amazon for rather cheap. I am sure a historian of gender could add more to this conversation. By comparison to Catalina, Joan is a person who makes poor fashion choices.

For anyone interested in the controversies surrounding religious women, I'd recommend Sean Field's The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trial of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart (2012) or, although she can be quite dense, anything by Carolyn Walker-Bynum, starting with Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987). For Joan, there is too much literature, but I remember finding Wheeler and Wood's Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc (1996) quite good, and I believe it also includes a chapter on the question of transvestism.

u/seven_seven · 5 pointsr/funny

There were cannibal tribes in the Caribbean where Columbus explored, but the majority of natives he encountered simply wanted to trade or just actively avoided them.

Source: http://www.amazon.com/Columbus-The-Four-Voyages-1492-1504/dp/B00CVDO8RA

u/ate50eggs · 5 pointsr/NewOrleans

Thanks! My grandfather was an interesting guy...came from a wealthy family yet became a communist and volunteered as an ambulance driver during the Spanish Civil war.

He wrote about his experiences in the war in a book called "War is Beautiful" and a thinly veiled fictional book about a wealthy New Orleans family called "Rain of Ashes" (which is probably what got him disinherited).

Unfortunately he died of a heart attack when my father was 2 years old, so I never got to meet him.

u/intangible-tangerine · 2 pointsr/books

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cider-Rosie-Vintage-classics-Laurie/dp/0099285665

It was published in 1959 and is about his childhood around the turn of the century in a little village in the Southwest of England where modernity is just around the corner (motor cars are exciting for example). It's beautifully written, combining an idyllic view of childhood with the sorrows of poverty etc.

u/ShamelesslyPlugged · 2 pointsr/history

I'm going to give you some ideas that are a little off the wall, but maybe fun. These are some of the books I really enjoyed in college. They're history, but not exactly. Instead of being the actual events of what happened, they're the larger than life tales that may also give some perspective.

The story of El Cid - the premier knight in Spanish history. It's a very fun story, and grains of truth reside in it.

This book is a historians attempt to find those grains of truth.

Civil Wars of Granada I did not read all of, but what I did read was very interesting. It's the tale of the Spanish defeating the last bastion of the Moors.

I couldn't find it in English, but if you read Spanish, El Abencerraje is a tale of Moorish chivalry. There's a theme of conversion of the "good" Moors that's also rather interesting, also found in Civil Wars of Granada. As an aside, all the books I've listed are translations and I have not found the best translations - just the titles on Amazon. If you can read Spanish, read the originals.

My final recommendation is not entirely germane to your interests, but a tangent to them. Shipwrecked or, in the original Spanish, Naufragios, is the biographical story of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish conquistador who was shipwrecked and spent years living amongst the natives before returning to a Spanish colony. This one is actually, I believe, an autobiography.

u/unicorntreadmill · 2 pointsr/Madrid
u/beseku · 2 pointsr/Spanish

I'm almost done with Ghosts of Spain and while it wanders a bit, it is giving me lots of insights into Spanish culture that I didn't previously have.

u/Sressolf · 2 pointsr/polandball

Hey, it's no problem - the numbers do tend to vary. Let's look over the losses listed in the texts I have on hand, because I don't trust Wikipedia and refuse to click on your link:

In Independence or Death!, the author says that Paraguay suffered an almost 50% casualty rate, leaving a population of 221,000, with only 28,000 of them men (12.6%) (p 198). However, all the way back on page 7, he says that the estimated population of Paraguay in 1864 ranged between 450,000 and 1.5 million, "with the former being more correct." If this is the case, then his postwar population estimate would be based on the absolute lowest estimate available, so take it with a grain of salt.

Paraguay: Power Game, a slim monograph, agrees with this number on page 20, but I don't consider it to be a trustworthy source since it is highly revisionist and clearly written to emphasize Paraguayan victimhood at the hands of foreign powers: it promotes the idea that the real cause of the war was that Brazil, Argentina, and the United Kingdom wanted access to Paraguay's natural resources, and that the UK was threatened because Paraguay was "creating a more autonomous economic model," as Lilia Schwarcz puts it in The Emperor's Beard (she doubts this theory). This is obvious BS given the fact that, on the very same page as that claim, the authors say that Lopez was the one who invaded Argentina and Brazil).

Fear and Memory in the Brazilian Army and Society has a short segment on the war, and although it gives no absolute numbers it says that 60%-69% of the Paraguayan population died, and that there was a gender imbalance of 1-4/5 men to women following the war.

In this biography of marshal Lopez, the population is first said to have been halved, but in the same paragraph it is also said to have been reduced by three quarters, with a 1-2 male-female imbalance. The total postwar population is said to be 116,000, although "[o]thers think the number [is] somewhat larger." (p 193)

He cites this paper, but the paper itself estimates the population to be between 141,351 and 166,351; he appears to have deliberately left out the authors' correction for regions which didn't participate in the 1870 census, and the gender imbalance is said to be 4/5 to 1. I don't trust this book much, since the author seems to personally hate Lopez - every single page drips with vitriol. Biographies of Hitler are less biased. Also, this paper casts doubt on their claims.

Based on all this I think we can kinda-sorta guesstimate that around half to three fifths of Paraguayans died, with four out of five men dying, but that a there is a lot of hedge betting going on. There are other papers on this subject and I've avoided Spanish and Portuguese texts because my Portuguese is very bad and I don't speak Spanish at all, so there are some limitations. Also, I'd be happy to share the papers with you if you don't have access to JSTOR yourself, but I think I'll take a break. If I've messed up in some monumental way, please report me to /r/badhistory. :)

u/[deleted] · 2 pointsr/politics

we're talking past each other; full employment yes, but no solution other than guaranteed minimum income

but is the nation truly at <5% unemployment? no, as the first article says

>But across the Rust Belt and so much of America that is still chronically jobless and struggling, you could hear a pin drop.

the rust belt is economically irrelevant; after nations rebuilt their industry and the global economy ticked up in the 60s and beyond, america wasn't the only game in town for steel production, durable goods, etc

[marcos' our word is our weapon is a good introduction]
(https://www.amazon.com/Our-Word-Weapon-Selected-Writings/dp/158322663X)

and david simon's blurb in the guardian was a good summary of what he continually talks about

but like simon says early on in that article, you can't read marx beyond his critique of capitalism and you can't read marcos beyond his critique of american economic imperialism because it starts to get political and overly opinionated

u/amazon-converter-bot · 1 pointr/FreeEBOOKS

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.co.uk

amazon.ca

amazon.com.au

amazon.in

amazon.com.mx

amazon.de

amazon.it

amazon.es

amazon.com.br

amazon.nl

amazon.co.jp

amazon.fr

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, amazon.nl, amazon.co.jp, amazon.fr, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.

u/Boiboiboi999202020 · 1 pointr/slavelabour

Need: Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World (1st Edition) by Catalina De Erauso

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Lieutenant-Nun-Memoir-Basque-Transvestite/dp/0807070734

for $5 or less

u/terminus-trantor · 1 pointr/EarlyModernEurope

Sources (moved to seperate post for clarity):

Books and articles:

u/Amalgamation · 1 pointr/AskReddit
u/Bos35 · 1 pointr/AskReddit

I'm currently reading Over the Edge of the World about Magellan's circumnavigation of the Earth. Highly recommend it, plus it's not fiction so you are actually learning at the same time.