Author Archive for James D. Fernández

Bob Dylan and the Spanish Civil War

February 28, 2011
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Bob Dylan and the Spanish Civil War

Suze Rotolo, 1943 – 2011 The press is reporting the sad news of the death of Suze Rotolo, the American artist, teacher and political activist who was Bob Dylan’s companion and muse in the early 1960s.  Rotolo is frequently credited with Dylan’s awakening to politics.  According to one obituary she took the “then fairly...
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The Resynchronization of a Regime (1940-1950)

February 28, 2011
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The Resynchronization of a Regime (1940-1950)

In 1940, Francisco Franco, using the pseudonym Jaime de Andrade, authored a treatment for a screenplay, titled “Raza :  Story lines for a film script.”  The following year, the script was made into a feature-length film, produced by the government. The original text and the 1941 film are invaluable documents, as they offer us...
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ALBA: A Laboratory of Experiments in Moral Courage

February 20, 2011
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ALBA:  A Laboratory of Experiments in Moral Courage

The thousands of documents, images and artifacts that make up the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives can mean different things to different people. To the veterans and their immediate friends and family, the Archives are, among other things, a repository of the personal papers and effects of loved ones, a kind of extended and collective...
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Wikileaks avant la wiki (3): Department of State press release, Mar. 4, 1946.

February 13, 2011
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Wikileaks avant la wiki (3): Department of State press release, Mar. 4, 1946.

Opening statement from the US Department of State, from the publication “The Spanish Government and the Axis,” a collection of the wartime correspondence between Franco, Hitler and Mussolini which was discovered in Germany in 1945: THE GOVERNMENTS of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America have exchanged views with regard to...
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Wikileaks, avant la Wiki: FDR on Franco in 1945 (2)

February 11, 2011
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Wikileaks, avant la Wiki: FDR on Franco in 1945 (2)

I recently stumbled across a WikiLeaks-like March 1945 letter by FDR to the new US Ambassador in Madrid, saying that the US government will hold its nose and maintain relations with the Franco regime, but that it repudiates the origins and ideology of the regime. Little did I know that this brief archival document...
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Esteban Vicente exhibition at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery

February 10, 2011
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Esteban Vicente exhibition at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery

Today I visited NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, which is hosting (until March 26, 2011) a lovely exhibition titled “Concrete Improvisations:  Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente.”  I was accompanied by Julia Newman, former Executive Director of ALBA, who is also the creator of the film “Into the Fire:  American Women and the Spanish Civil...
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Parallelisms in posters: 1808 / 1936

February 10, 2011
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Parallelisms in posters:  1808 / 1936

"Expel the invader!" Posters contextualize events by inserting them into a series, into a narrative. In a subgroup of Republican Spanish Civil War posters, the struggle of the Republic against the forces of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini is likened to the popular resistance against the French invaders of 1808.
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Wikileaks, avant la Wiki: FDR on Franco in 1945

February 8, 2011
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Wikileaks, avant la Wiki: FDR on Franco in 1945

The wikileaks affaire has given us a glimpse  into the private language of diplomacy, into the kinds of things that diplomats say to each other and to their bosses when they think their remarks are off the record. Historians have always placed great value on diplomatic communiqués for precisely this reason, though they usually...
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Spaniards and Latinos in the International Brigades

February 6, 2011
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Spaniards and Latinos in the International Brigades

Last year, when Sebastiaan Faber and I tried to identify the black IBer portrayed in a picture by the great photographer Centelles, we came across a great many documents that would help a patient historian tell the relatively unknown story of the US-based volunteers from Spain and from Spanish-speaking America who joined...
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Statue of Liberty, Spanish Republic

January 27, 2011
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Statue of Liberty, Spanish Republic

Spanish postage stamp from 1937 celebrating Spain/US relations.
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