In November 1986 the Center for European Studies held a colloquium to mark the fifty years that had passed since the beginning of the Civil War in Spain. In drawing together plans for the conference we chose to emphasize the enormous transformation experienced by Spain in the past half-eentury rather than focus on a commemoration of the struggles of the 1930s. To this end we invited a distinguished group of panelists to participate in two days of discussions at the Center based on presentations by historians and social scientists from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Spain. The papers and discussions during the conference focused on a number of themes, including the social dimensions of the conflict of the 1930s, the surviving historical memories of the Civil War and the meanings associated with those memories, the making of contemporary democratic Spain, and the enormous contrast between the society of the 1980s and that of half a century earlier.
