Joan Connelly Ullman was a professor in the University of Washington’s (UW) Department of History and a historian of modern Spain with a focus on the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (officially known as the XV International Brigade).
Joan was born on July 8, 1929, in New York City to Charles James Connelly and Gladys (Mullen) Connelly. For her undergraduate studies, she attended the University of California, Los Angeles (1947-1948) before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley (1948-1951), where she earned a B.A. in History and English and was elected as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After earning an M.A. in History at Bryn Mawr College in 1953, Joan was commissioned as a foreign services officer with the U.S. Department of State and served as a political assistant for the embassies in Guatemala and Madrid in Spain, namely translating documents and writing political reports. Concluding diplomatic service in 1957, she served as Director of Adult Educational Programs at the International Institute for Girls in Madrid until 1961 before becoming the Dean of Student Life and an Assistant Professor of History at Elbert Covell College of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. In June 1963, Joan was awarded a Ph.D. in History from Bryn Mawr College.
In 1966, Joan joined the UW’s Department of History as a full-time, tenure-track assistant professor, when it was rare for women to be hired for this type of position in higher education, becoming an associate professor in 1968 and tenured in 1973. During her time at UW, Harvard University Press published her principal work, The Tragic Week: A Study of Anticlericalism in Spain, 1875-1912, in 1968 and Ariel Press in Barcelona published the Spanish edition, La Semana Trágica: studio sobre las causas socioeconómias del anticlericalismo en España (1898-1912), in 1972. She published numerous articles and translated a selection of works, including Approaches to the History of Spain (1967). She retired as emeritus in 1995, but continued research focusing on conversos, Sephardic Jews who converted to Catholicism in the 14th and 15th centuries. Other notable accomplishments throughout her career included receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972) and serving as a Fellow of the American Association of University Women, a trustee of Bryn Mawr College (1984-1990), a board of directors member for the Washington State Jewish History Society, a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center (1985), among others.
Joan was married to Edward Louis Ullman in 1967 until his death in 1976 and subsequently was married to Donald Elliot Spickard in 1982 until his death in 2003. On January 30, 2022, Joan passed away in California.
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Organized into 3 accessions.
Committee files (Jewish Studies Program Faculty and Staff, Women Studies Review Committee, Latin American Studies Committee, and the Columbian Quincentenary Project Advisory Board), correspondence pertaining to research and professional commitments (including service on the Board of Directors of the Washington State Jewish Historical Society), research files and notes pertaining to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Spanish Civil War, departmental records, educational and course materials, newsletters, publications, clippings, and floppy disks.
No restrictions on access. No user access copy is currently available for floppy disks but users may obtain a reproduction of the media for a fee by contacting Special Collections.
Restrictions may exist on copying, quotation, or publication. Contact Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries for details.
Accession No. 4580-001 received from Joan Connelly Ullman in 1995. Accessions No. 4580-002 and 4580-003 received from Glennys Young, UW Department of History, in 2017 and 2019.
Both editions of Ullman's principal work,