Author Archive for James D. Fernández

Treasures in the Archives: Shapiro SCW Scrapboook

June 22, 2012
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Treasures in the Archives:  Shapiro SCW Scrapboook

I had the pleasure of visiting the ALBA archives a couple of weeks ago with Alan Levine, a New York-based civil rights attorney with a longstanding interest in the Lincolns.  In the early 1960s, fresh out of Yale Law School, Alan took a job on Wall Street, a decision which he soon regretted.  In...
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La diáspora española en EEUU y la Guerra Civil Española

June 16, 2012
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La diáspora española en EEUU y la Guerra Civil Española

En inglés aquí. 1937.  Una gira campestre en Toro Park, a 15 kilómetros de la ciudad de Monterey, California.  Varios centenares de inmigrantes españoles que se han establecido en la Península de Monterey y en el Valle de Santa Clara disfrutan de un ameno “picnic”.  Pero los puños en alto nos recuerdan que en...
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The Spanish Diaspora in the US and the Spanish Civil War

June 15, 2012
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The Spanish Diaspora in the US and the Spanish Civil War

En español aquí. 1937.  A picnic in Toro Park, 9 miles from Monterey, California.  Several hundred Spaniards from the Monterey Peninsula and the Santa Clara Valley enjoy a pleasurable get-together.  But the raised clenched fists remind us that a war is going on in Spain, and that this social gathering 6,000 miles away in...
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Facing Fascism, in Beckley, West Virginia, for example

April 2, 2012
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Facing Fascism, in Beckley, West Virginia, for example

On March 27, 1938, Avelino González Mallada, former mayor of the Asturian city of Gijón, died in a car crash on a country road in Woodstock, Virginia.  The New York Times (p. 4) explained on the next day that “Señor Mallada was in this country on a sixty-day permit granted to him by the...
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Facing Fascism, in Tampa, Florida, for example

March 30, 2012
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Facing Fascism, in Tampa, Florida, for example

Tampa, Florida was a sleepy town of just a few thousand inhabitants when, in 1885, the Spanish cigarmakers Vicente Martínez Ybor and Ignacio Haya decided to relocate their “clear Havana tobacco” cigar factories to the area from Key West.  (They had relocated in 1869 from Havana to Key West to avoid both the high...
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Facing Fascism, in Barre, Vermont, for example

March 28, 2012
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Facing Fascism, in Barre, Vermont, for example

Another somewhat unlikely focus of anti-fascist activism during the Spanish Civil War was Barre, Vermont.  The town was home to a significant population of working class Spaniards most of whom had left their native region of Cantabria (Santander) during the first decades of the twentieth century to work in the granite quarries and stone...
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Facing Fascism in Vacaville, California, for example

March 28, 2012
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Facing Fascism in Vacaville, California, for example

The 2007 museum show and catalog “Facing Fascism:  New York and the Spanish Civil War” broke new ground by focusing on the way individuals and communities in New York city responded to the outbreak, conduct, and outcome of the Spanish Civil War. And while New York was a particularly active site for all kinds...
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Tremlett Reviews Preston’s “Spanish Holocaust”

March 9, 2012
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Tremlett Reviews Preston’s “Spanish Holocaust”

Giles Tremlett, correspondent of The Guardian in Madrid, and author of Ghosts of Spain, reviews Paul Preston’s latest book about terrorism and its legacy in Franco’s Spain. “Franco had time to impose his own version of history, which still prevents contemporary Spain from “looking upon its recent violent past in an open and honest...
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Caught in the crossfire: Collateral damage in the Garzón case

March 3, 2012
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Caught in the crossfire: Collateral damage in the Garzón case

I have just read the writ with which the presiding judge dismisses, on the grounds of an expired statute of limitations, the so-called “New York” case against Baltasar Garzón. In this writ of dismissal, as well as in his previous writ of indictment, the judge claims that New York University has concealed or fudged...
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Margaret Palmer and Robert Raven

December 17, 2011
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Margaret Palmer and Robert Raven

In the 1930s, Margaret Palmer was an American expat living in Spain, and working as a local agent for the Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art.  She also was in charge of the Spanish section of the Carnegie’s annual International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting from 1923-38. In the “Archives of American Art Journal” (26:2-3, 1986)*,...
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