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Spanish continues to be used by millions of citizens and immigrants to the United States from Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas (for example, many Cubans arrived in Miami, Florida, beginning with the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and followed by other Latin American groups; the local majority is now Spanish-speaking).
This is a timeline of Spanish history, comprising important legal and territorial changes and political events in Spain and its predecessor states. To read about the background to these events, see History of Spain .
The contemporary history of Latin America. Durham : Duke University Press, 1993. Herring, Hubert, A History of Latin America: from the Beginnings to the Present, 1955. ISBN 0-07-553562-9; Kaufman, Will, and Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, eds. Britain and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History (3 vol 2005), 1157pp; encyclopedic coverage; excerpt
In all these countries, Latin American Spanish is the vernacular language of the majority of the population, giving Spanish the most native speakers of any Romance language. In Africa it is one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea. Spanish was one of the official languages in the Philippines in Southeast Asia until 1973.
In the post-Roman period before 711, the history of the Spanish language began with Old Spanish; the other Latin-derived Hispanic languages with a considerable body of literature are Catalan (which had a relevant golden age of Valencian), and to a lesser degree Aragonese. Asturian Medieval Spanish, Galician and Basque were primarily oral.
The Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro) was a period of flourishing arts and letters in the Spanish Empire (now Spain and the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America), coinciding with the political decline and fall of the Habsburgs. Arts flourished despite the decline of the empire in the 17th century.
Vulgar Latin (in Latin, sermo vulgaris) is a blanket term covering vernacular usage or dialects of the Latin language spoken from earliest times in Italy until the latest dialects of the Western Roman Empire, diverging significantly after 500 AD, evolved into the early Romance languages, whose writings began to appear about the 9th century.
The Spanish American wars of independence (Spanish: Guerras de independencia hispanoamericanas) took place across the Spanish Empire in the early 19th century. The struggles in both hemispheres began shortly after the outbreak of the Peninsular War , forming part of the broader context of the Napoleonic Wars .