Representations of the Spanish Hunger Years (1939–1952) in recent secondary school history textbooks

Abstract

Based on the potential of educational materials to forge and shape the collective memory, this article analyses the representations of the Francoist Hunger Years (1939–1952) in recent history textbooks for secondary schools by a wide range of publishers. The main thesis of the paper is that while there are textbooks that provide a complex narrative of the hunger experiences, others–even some of the most recent ones–depict the period in an oversimplified and historiographically outdated way and fail to address various social perspectives. This article also argues that it is possible to detect the persistence of the official Francoist discourse on the years of hunger in some textbooks that continue to implicitly perpetuate the distortion and oblivion the Franco dictatorship tried to impose on the famine.