Is there a Social History of the Spanish Civil War in the 21st Century?

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the presence of social history in the historiographical production of the 21st century on the Spanish Civil War (1936-‍39). Although the heterogeneity and polyphony of social history is evident, if we agree on a minimum common denominator of study topics, methods and objectives, it is possible to draw a certain evolution. After having enjoyed an undoubted prominence, since the end of the 20th century, as it opened to the proposals and ways of cultural history, this approach lost presence, and it seemed that its explanatory power, in the historiography of the Spanish Civil War. However, it was not a sudden Copernican turn, nor was it the obsequies of the approach, nor was it due solely to its epistemological limits, since it was part of broader shifts in the historiographical field and in the world of the turn of the millennium. In fact, the most recent bibliography shows how research of that war and Francoism origins is reopening, with a different view, to the objects of study and tools associated with a renewed social history.