Professor of History Karl Qualls will present the lecture "Stalin’s Niños: Raising Spanish Civil War Refugees in the Soviet Union, 1937-1951," on Thursday, Nov. 13, at 4:30 p.m. in Denny Hall, room 317.
In 1937, thousands of children fled the violence and Civil War in Spain and went to the Soviet Union, where Stalin and his Communist Party welcomed them and established over 20 boarding schools for them.
Qualls will talk about his first-of-its-kind research, which seeks to understand how and why the Soviets raised these children, to what degree they were allowed to be Spanish, how they were raised in a Soviet environment and how they endured both their original evacuation from Spain and then two more evacuations within the Soviet Union during World War II to avoid the Nazi invasion.
Qualls was selected by the history department’s majors committee to present the fifth annual Whitfield Bell Lecture, in honor of the late Whitfield J. Bell, a former Dickinson professor, member of class 1935, author and pioneer in historical editing.
For more information, call 717-25-1521.
Published November 11, 2014