History Teaching and Cultural Hegemony

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-95
Author(s):  
Johanna Fricke

In the 1960s, facing a series of transformations within Spanish society, the Franco regime modified its self-legitimation strategy and with it its portrayal of the Spanish Civil War. Based on the analysis of nine history textbooks for various levels published between 1954 and 1970, this article demonstrates that, by aiming to neutralize increasing demands for democracy, reconciliation and peace, the Franco regime incorporated elements of the corresponding discourses into its own memory discourse. The later the year of publication and the higher the age of the intended readership, the more signs of this process of incorporation appear in the textbooks. Examples of such traces can be found in the terms used to denote the Spanish Civil War, in the textbooks’ characterizations of the two opposing sides, and in their presentation of both the Francoist governmental system and the development of Spain under Francoism.

Author(s):  
Enric Bou

This article addresses four different ways in which food speaks to us: a surrealist approach in Buñuel’s cinema, table manners as discussed by Larra, the shortage of food and hunger that was an obsessive and persistent reality during the Spanish civil war and post-war period of the 20th century, or the recent sophistication and cosmopolitanism of Spanish cuisine due to the transformation of the country by the presence of immigrants. This study focuses on highlighting the passage from a culture of survival during the civil war and the Franco regime to one of greater abundance and sophistication with the arrival of democracy. The current recognition of Spain as one of the gastronomic destinations in the world modifies part of a historical and cultural past, which includes the ethnic transformation experienced by Spanish society. From the perspective of food studies, one can examine the relationships of the individual with food, and analyse how this association produces a large amount of information about a society.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. e010
Author(s):  
Carlos Píriz

During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, some thirty Diplomatic Missions opened their doors and create new sites for the reception of persecution victims under the protection of the right of asylum. However, beyond the humanitarian role, a tendentious collaboration of some of their delegates with the rebels could be seen from the beginning. Argentina and Chile, which held the Diplomatic Deanship in those years, were two prime examples of this. A good number of their representatives used various strategies to help the coup plotters of 1936, such as the refuge, care and irregular extraction of people or espionage. At the same time, they played a role that alternated between searching for consensus with other Diplomatic Missions (mainly the Latin American ones), which really meant demanding that those other legations follow their lead, and denouncing the excesses of the consolidated republican rearguard, especially on the international scene. A situation which tarnishes the image of the legitimate Spanish governments. Once the contest ended, many of those collaborators were praised and rewarded by the Franco regime, and other fascists regimes. This research focuses on demonstrating, based on original documentation and providing new and compelling data, that close (and proven) relationship.


2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
José M. Pacheco

ArgumentThis paper considers some aspects of the reception and development of contemporary mathematics in Spain during the first half of the twentieth century, more specifically between 1910 and 1950. It analyzes the possible influence of scientists’ mobility in the adoption of newer views or theories. A short overview of key points of the social and scientific background in nineteenth-century Spain locates the expounded facts in an appropriate context. Three leading threads are followed. First is the consideration of the mobility of some Spanish mathematicians during a period including World War I and World War II – when Spain was a theoretically neutral country – and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Second, the emergence and socio-political behavior of a dominant mathematical group gathered around Julio Rey Pastor between 1915 and 1936 is also accounted for, as well as its continuity after the Civil War into the 1940s. Third, attention is paid to the migration or interior exile of a number of mathematicians as a consequence of the Civil War. The paper is organized around nine Tables containing information on mobility of mathematicians, doctorates awarded in the mathematical sciences, and mathematical production in Spain during this period, accompanied by statistical résumés and comments on interesting entries. The main conclusions drawn are: 1) a number of integrants of the Rey group, himself included, officially traveled to Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland – usually after having obtained doctorates and fixed positions – imported mathematical knowledge into Spain; 2) the group also managed to dominate the mathematical panorama from both the scientific and the sociological viewpoint; 3) social usages in Spanish mathematical affairs established in Spain in the years prior to the Civil War present a clear continuity under the Franco regime once the war was over.


Author(s):  
Omar G. Encarnación

This chapter explains the persistence of Spain’s ‘politics of forgetting’, a phenomenon revealed by the wilful intent to disremember the political memory of the violence of the Spanish Civil War and the human rights abuses of General Franco’s authoritarian regime. Looking beyond the traumas of the Civil War, the limits on transitional justice and truth-telling on the Franco regime imposed by a transition to democracy anchored on intra-elite pacts, and the conciliatory and forward-looking political culture that consolidated in the new democracy, this analysis emphasizes a decidedly less obvious explanation: the political uses of forgetting. Special attention is paid to how the absence of a reckoning with the past, protected politicians from both the right and the left from embarrassing and inconvenient political histories; facilitated the reinvention of the major political parties as democratic institutions; and lessened societal fears about repeating past historical mistakes. The conclusion of the chapter explains how the success of the current democratic regime, shifting public opinion about the past occasioned by greater awareness about the dark policies and legacies of the Franco regime, and generational change among Spain’s political class have in recent years diminished the political uses of forgetting. This, in turn, has allowed for a more honest treatment of the past in Spain’s public policies.


2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIUS RUIZ

This article considers whether the Franco regime pursued a genocidal policy against Republicans after the formal ending of hostilities on 1 April 1939. In post-war Spain, the primary mechanism for punishing Republicans was military tribunals. Francoist military justice was based on the assumption that responsibility for the civil war lay with the Republic: defendants were tried for the crime of ‘military rebellion’. This was, as Ramón Serrano Suñer admitted his memoirs, ‘turning justice on its head’. But although it was extremely harsh, post-war military justice was never exterminatory. The article stresses that the institutionalisation of military justice from 1937, following the arbitrary murders of 1936, contributed to a relative decline in executions. Although the regime's determination to punish Republicans for ‘military rebellion’ inevitably led to the initiation of tens of thousands of post-war military investigations, only a minority of cases ended in execution. This was especially the case from January 1940, when the higher military authorities ended the autonomy of military tribunals over sentencing. This reassertion of central control in January 1940 was part of a wider policy to ease the self-inflicted problem of prison overcrowding; successive parole decrees led to a substantial and permanent decrease in the number of inmates by 1945. Allied victory in the Second World War did not mark the beginning but the end of the process of bringing to a close mass military justice.


2011 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 113-122
Author(s):  
Eszter Katona

The anniversary of Federico Garría Lorca's death and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War is closely intertwined in the Spanish public awareness. The poet's birth date is equally an important date in the his toy of the Iberian nation, as Spain has lost its last colonies in 1898. Besides these two memorable dates, we also have to highlight 2007, when the Historical Memory Law (Ley de Memoria Histórica) was enacted, aiming to rehabilitate the victims of the Civil War and the Franco regime. This measure has launched such an avalanche on Spanish public life, that affected almost all the society in some way. The family of Garcia Lorca also had to take a commitment as the resting place of their world-famous relative was still unknown. In addition to the identification of the body of the dead poet, Lorca's homosexuality is a constant topic in literary and historical arríes. Today, Spanish society accepts the sexual orientation of the poet, but it remains disputed whether it had a real effec t on Lorca's poetry. Lorca's Hungarian popularity began in 1947 when Gypsy Ballads was issued then the premier of Bernarda in 1955, and has remained unbroken ever since. In connection with this year's anniversary, this study aims to present these three topics — the location of Lorca's resting place, Lorca's homosexuality, Lorca's reception in Hungary.


2020 ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Gaetano Antonio Vigna

Resumen: En esta contribución se estudia la escena del aprendizaje lector y el encuentro con el libro que seis escritores contemporáneos cristalizan en sus libros de memorias. A través del análisis de tres tópicos estrechamente relacionados con dicha vivencia de la etapa infantil —la influencia de mentor; la rebelión al mundo escolar; el listado de obras influyentes—, se apreciará el poder consolador y correctivo del libro en el trasfondo histórico de la Guerra Civil española y de los primeros años del franquismo. A partir de esta aproximación, el artículo mostrará, por un lado, cómo los niños protagonistas de los libros escogidos contestarán el canon literario impuesto y el sistema educativo oficial, rechazado a favor del autodidactismo. Por el otro, será posible apreciar el retrato que estos memorialistas ofrecen de aquellos años de represión.Abstract: In this paper we study the scene of the learning of reading and the encounter with the Book as six contemporary writers narrate in their memoirs. Through the analysis of three autobiographemes related to this experience of the childhood —the mentor’s influence; the school rebellion; the list of influential literary works—, we will appreciate the consoling and corrective power of the book during the Spanish Civil War and the earlier years of the Francoist regime. From this approach, this paper will show, on the one hand, how the main characters of the selected memoirs reject the imposed literary canon, as well as the formal educational system in favor of self-learning. On the other, it will give us a portrait of Spanish society in those repressive years.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942110630
Author(s):  
Daniela R.P. Weiner

The parallels and interconnections between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany are not merely a matter of contemporary scholarly interest, but also were and still are a charged political and societal question. Through an analysis of discourse in school history textbooks, this article analyzes how scholars, students, teachers and state authorities perceived these parallels and interconnections during the immediate postwar period. The paper investigates how the earliest history textbooks – published in the post-fascist successor states of East Germany, West Germany, and Italy between 1950 and 1960 – evaluated the relationship between Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany during the 1930s. The 1930s are key because they began with Mussolini as the senior fascist dictator; over the course of the decade – with the war in Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, the passage of anti-Semitic racial laws, and the creation of the Pact of Steel – Hitler's Germany eclipsed Mussolini's Italy as the preeminent fascist power. By looking at postwar textbooks’ representations of the Fascist Italy–Nazi Germany relationship during the 1930s, we can see that the postwar post-fascist states often blamed each other for the emergence of the especially imperialist, racist and violent elements of fascism. Thus, this article illustrates how educational materials marshalled deflection strategies during the long process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.


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