This week a group of young Spaniards is participating in the seventh annual Summer Camp to Recover the Historical Memory of Extremadura, ABC reports. Organized by the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica de Extremadura (ARMHEX), the camp brings young people between 18 and 30 years of age from Aragón, Murcia,...
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Sam Lesser, of London's East End, left to fight fascism in Spain when he was 18 years old. Now 92, he tells his story to the BBC (10-minute sound clip).
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Daniel Eagan, writing for the Smithsonian, considers the importance of the recently recovered 18-minute film With the Lincoln Brigade in Spain, by Henri Cartier-Bresson (clip here):
With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade is not high art, but it is a passionate film that complements Cartier-Bresson’s other work. It...
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During a visit to a secret detention center in Argentina employed during the Junta years (1976-83), the Spanish investigative magistrate Baltasar Garzón--suspended for his attempt to open an investigation of crimes against humanity committed during the Franco dictatorship--took advantage to defend the principle of universal jurisdiction, which stipulates that any domestic courts may try...
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The newly redesigned website of the office of the Spanish Prime Minister, the Moncloa Palace, no longer mentions Franco as a former head of state, but instead only lists the country's five Prime Ministers since 1976, Público reports. The previous iteration of the website listed leaders going back to the early nineteenth...
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"This is War! Robert Capa at Work" along with a selection of Spanish Civil War work by Gerda Taro--a combined exhibit that first opened at the International Center of Photography in New York two years ago--has made it to Madrid, El País reports. The show will be up at the
Alan Singer, who teaches at Hofstra, was asked to give this year's graduation address at University Heights High School in the Bronx. He turned to Dolores Ibárruri for inspiration:
Stand up! Defend the rights of children! Endure sacrifice rather than grant victory to forces that represent oppression and tyranny. Teachers!...
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David Rovics has written a song honoring Lincoln vet Bob Steck. Read the lyrics at Anti-War Songs / Canzoni Contro la Guerra or listen to it here:
They say people get conservative /
The older that they age /
They say that being radical /
Is just...
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A section on Lincoln vet Abe Osheroff at the Voices Education Project. Includes great photos.
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As reported earlier, the Spain's 2007 Law of Historical Memory did not annul Francoist sentences, although it did, ambiguously, declare the tribunals that issued them to be “illegitimate.” As a result, it is now up to individual victim's families to request actual legal annulments. After Andulucía's request for an annulment in the...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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We talk about the “return” of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain, even though that massive painting had never been here before its “repatriation” in 1981. The magnificent show “Ben Shahn: On Non-Conformity” curated by Laura Katzman and on display until February 26 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, elicits a similar sense:...
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Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
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Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
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When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
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Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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