Episode 64 with Patricia Schechter

In this episode, Patricia Schechter, a professor of history at Portland State University, joins the podcast to discuss the history of Pueblonuevo del Terrible, a rough-and-tumble mining town in Spain’s Córdoba Province. Starting with an overview of the landscape of the town and the story of its unusual name, Schechter then traces the history of its struggles to obtain recognition and build a sense of place from the 1880s through the end of the Spanish Civil War.  Along the way, we touch on themes of the period as wide ranging as place, global capitalism, labor, religion and the state.

The Episode

The Guest

Patricia Schechter is professor of history at Portland State University in Oregon where she has taught since 1995. She received her BA in American Studies from Mount Holyoke College and her PhD in History from Princeton University. Her first book, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform (UNC 2001) won the Sierra Book Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians. Her subsequent publications and public history projects have been recognized for their excellence by the Oral History Association, Library Choice, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. She is currently editor of the scholarly journal Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000. Her new book, El Terrible: Life and Labor in Pueblonuevo, 1887-1939, is a transnational social and community history of a mining town in Andalusia, Spain, published by Routledge in 2024.

Suggested Readings

Kaplan, Temma. “Redressing the Balance: Gendered Acts of Justice around the Mining Community of Rio Tinto in 1913,” 283-300 in Constructing Spanish Womanhood: Female Identity in Modern Spain, eds. Victoria Loree Enders and Pamela Beth Radcliff. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Kerry, Matthew. Un pueblo revolucionado: el octubre de 1934 y la Segunda República en Asturias. Granada: Comares Editorial, 2024.

Parody Garcia Parody, Manuel Angel. El Germinal del Sur: Conflictos mineros en el Alto Guadiato (1881-1936). Sevilla: Fundación Centro de Estudios Andaluces, 2009.

Radcliff, P. B. (1996). From mobilization to civil war: the politics of polarization in the Spanish city of Gijon, 1900-1937. Cambridge University Press.

Shubert, Adrian. The Road to Revolution in Spain: The coal Miners of Asturias, 1860-1934. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.