During the last weekend of May, the national organizations of friends of International Brigade veterans (Coordinación Internacional de Asociaciones de amigos de los combatientes en la España republicana, or ACER) met in Paris, among other things to plan a series of events to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the International Brigades in...
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In its online Memorial Day slide show last week, The Nation included an image of Republican troops marching in Madrid (image 4), and a letter from a Lincoln Brigader that the magazine published in 1937.
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A video of a talk by biographer Irme Schaber on Gerda Taro, the Spanish Civil War photographer who worked with Robert Capa and died in Spain, and whose images will be part of the "Mexican Suitcase" exhibit at the ICP this fall.
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Forced as a child to live with her aunt, Conxa toils the harsh farmland of the Pyrenees, finding love in the form of local builder, Jaume, until his involvement with the Communist revolutionaries threatens her hard-won security.
As lapidary as its title suggests, this is a book of muted emotions. Conxa’s world is one in...
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The website of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives has just had a facelift. Check out the new look and improved navigation, including the ALBA Digital Library...
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The Socialist History News reports the death of British scholar Jim Fyrth, who wrote extensively about the history of the Popular Front and the British Left, including its involvement in the Spanish Civil War (see for example this article on the Aid Spain movement).
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The Spanish Ministry of Culture has launched a web portal on victims of the Spanish Civil War. In compliance with the so-called Law of Historical Memory, adopted in December 2007, this portal seeks to provide the public with an easy way to access to any information available in public archives about those who...
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The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company's version of Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Ryan Whinnem and performed June 11–July 11 among the ruins of the Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park in Maryland, is set during the Spanish Civil War.
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ALBA's sister organization in the UK, the International Brigade Memorial Trust, has just published its second newsletter of the year, featuring reviews of Angela Jackson's new book and the catalog of the Antifascistas exhibit; news on Garzón and newly unveiled monuments; and a report of a visit by SCW vets to the House of...
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Michael Kerrigan reviews ALBA Board member Antonio Muñoz Molina's ambitious Civil War novel, La noche de los tiempos, for the Times Literary Supplement (pdf):
Written with lyric intensity and epic scope, La noche de los tiempos engages as only a novel can with the everyday stuff...
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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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