Between memory and history: Social relationships and ways of remembering the Spanish civil war

This brief article focuses on putative connections between public and popular historical movements in Spain to do with the civil war, on the one hand, and problems to be considered in constructing a social history of the war and the post-war era, on the other. One appropriate and useful concept for explaining the relationship between these two forms of recuperating the past, it is argued, is 'social memory', meaning the ways in which the past has been understood, talked about and assimilated in the past as well as in the present.