Letters in cursive Catalan, colorful cartoons, feminist magazines, propaganda posters that call for women to "smash" fascism.
These objects, all nearly a century old, are part of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library's extensive Spanish Civil War collections - and, one recent morning, were carefully handled and examined by undergraduate students enrolled in the fall semester course "Revolutionary Barcelona."
Barcelona has long been a "locus of revolution," explained Aurélie Vialette, the course instructor and a professor of Spanish and Portuguese in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The anarchist movement blossomed there two centuries ago; today, the city is at the heart of the ongoing movement for Catalan independence. Her class, taught in Spanish, traced these practices of political resistance all the way from the early 19th century to the Spanish Civil War.
