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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As Judge Baltasar Garzón faces a backlash that may cost him his position in Spain’s judiciary, ALBA invited María Blanco to give the keynote talk at the annual reunion of the Bay Area veterans and friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Berkeley, California, on May 30, 2010. What follows is the full...
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After twenty-six years in Barcelona, one of the world’s most prominent historians of twentieth-century Spain has moved back to the United States. Few foreign scholars command the respect and authority that Gabriel Jackson enjoys in Spain. For the past decade, Jackson has been working on a major biography of Juan Negrín, the Republic’s Prime...
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The morning of the publishing of the Saville Enquiry Report, June 15th 2010, I received an early call, from Elaine Brotherton, a close friend and niece of William McKinney, who was one of the thirteen men who shot dead by the British Army on January 30th 1972. The event became known to the world...
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Oliver Law, the first Black American to command white troops in battle, was appointed on July 5, 1937 as commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. According to eyewitness accounts of men under his command, Law died a hero’s death leading a charge against Francoist forces on Mosquito Hill at the Battle of Brunete on...
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This past July, around the 73rd anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War and 11 days after the opening of a large Robert Capa exhibit at the Catalan National Museum of Art, the Barcelona news paper El Periódico de Catalunya published what was billed as a stun ning revelation: Capa’s legendary photograph of...
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Charlie Fors was a Detroit automobile worker who volunteered to go to Spain to join the International Brigades. He had volunteered to drive a truck when it was told to the volunteers that there were trucks available, but no drivers for them.
He was assigned to drive a truck on the Cordoba front, Pozo Blanco...
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Who is the young black International Brigadier in doughboy gear whose portrait the Spanish government hopes to give to Barack Obama? In November the Spanish press put out a worldwide call for help in identifying the man on this stunning photo by Agustí Centelles. It was a challenge we could not pass up....
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On a Sunday evening in January Helen Graham, one of the most prominent English-speaking historians of twentieth-century Spain today, sat down to discuss her life-long fascination with the war, Spain’s attempts at “recovering” its historical memory, and the skewed way in which the war is still viewed by many U.S. scholars and intellectuals.
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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