This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic ’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. My relationship with English began by force. Growing up in A Coruña, Spain, in the early 2000s, we were told that learning a second language was just as important as memorizing the multiplication table. After the 2008 financial crisis left the Spanish economy “ melting down like a Dali horrorscape ,” as one Atlantic writer put it, English became what seemed like