Everyday life in turbulent times

Santiago de Pablo defends in his latest book, Gente corriente en tiempos convulsos. La vida cotidiana en el País Vasco, 1931-1939the study of the common man, his work, amusements, Education and customs, in order to learn about the past. The Full Professor of Contemporary History at the University of the Basque Country (UPV) has explained the methodological intricacies of his book, published by Betagarri Liburuak, at the seminar of the group of research in Recent History (GIHRE) of the University of Navarra.

The Full Professor of the UPV has cultivated, among other fields, the political history of the Basque Country, with special attention to the Second Republic, to which he dedicated his doctoral thesis . In a previous work (1995) he had already proposed to approach everyday life to obtain a complete vision of the past. In this new book, aimed at a broad public, in the spirit of knowledge dissemination, he has broadened the panorama by paying attention to phenomena that he had not studied, such as the history of women during the Second Republic or life in the national zone during the Civil War. The result is a work in which the everyday asks for a place in history.

Santiago de Pablo has resorted to sources such as advertisements, news of shows and local chronicles that appeared in the press, reports in fashion or social magazines, telephone directories and different municipal documents, as well as books of memoirs. For example, the Basque professor rescues from the memoirs of Dolores Ibarrúri, la Pasionaria, some features of life in the mining areas of Biscay. Another publication, the magazine Idearium, oriented from the seminar of Vitoria by Father Barandiarán, provides, to cite another example, a rich repertoire of religious sociology about the family or piety. Also the resource to statistics allows the author to offer a large-scale vision to which he puts a face in some pages of the book through various photographs.

The Full Professor of the UPV has explained its research in the seminar of the GIHRE, which this academic semester has also hosted, since September, professors Roberto Villa (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos), María Stella Ramírez (Oxford University) and Gema Pérez Herrera (Universidad de Valladolid).