Studia Historica: Historia Contemporánea (Mar 2018)
The Thirties and Forties from bellow: Social History and recent historiography about the Second Republic, the Civil War and the first postwar period
Abstract
This article revisits what has been written about the Spanish Second Republic, the Civil War and the postwar years from the point of view of social history. Its objective is to reflect on the presences and absences of that way of writing history in the last decades and on how our ways of writing history change over time. The text argues that social history played an important role in the origins of Spanish historiography on the Second Republic, the Civil War and the postwar period; that since the 1990s it has been renewed but its prominence has been greatly diminished; and that, as shown by his newfound spirit in the post-war study, the «social» approach, renewed and refined from previous burdens and problems, can still be very useful and even boost the critical study and representation of our recent past.
