Pianist Dred Scott, well-known to those who have attended ALBA's New York event in past years, stages a one-man labor protest:
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Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Pianist Dred Scott, well-known to those who have attended ALBA's New York event in past years, stages a one-man labor protest:
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The Library of Congress has announced that Philip Levine is the country's next Poet Laureate. In 2001, Levine delivered ALBA's fourth annual Bill Susman lecture, in which he spoke on "Poetry and the Spanish Civil War" and acknowledged his debt, as poet and citizen, to Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Miguel Hernández and...
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The DocuWeeks festival opening today in New York and Los Angeles will feature Trisha Ziff's Mexican Suitcase, the documentary about the recovery of 4,500 negatives from the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and "Chim" (David Seymour). Friends of ALBA are entitled to a special discount for the August 27th screening...
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August 14, 24, 25, 26, 28: New York International Fringe Festival.
The play is a roller coaster journey through Robeson's remarkable and eventful life, and highlights how his radical activism caused him to be disowned and disremembered, even by the leaders and descendants of the civil rights movement.
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Getty Images commemorates the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War with a selection of more than 100 powerful images by photojournalists. See the anthology here.
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A new historical drama series on Chilean public television, set during the Pinochet years in order to retell the first discoveries of the regime's widespread use of torture and disappearances, is drawing large numbers of viewers and exasperating some on the Right, the Associate Press reports:
In "The Archives of the Cardinal,"...
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North Wales International Brigader Tom Jones, also known as Twm Sbaen (Tom Spain), will be honoured at a ceremony at the Cymru Cuba stand at the National Eisteddfod at Wrexham at 3:30pm on 4 August. Twm was a miner for 14 years and served in the British Anti-Tank Battery in Spain. In later years...
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On the Norwegian island of Utoya, scene of that horrific massacre of young members of the Labor Party by a right-wing Christian terrorist, there is a plaque, tacked on to a tree, honoring the four Norwegian members of the International Brigades who were killed in the Spanish Civil War. Apparently, the young campers had...
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Dan Carrier remembers the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War with a portrait of his great-uncle Nat Cohen, IBer from the UK, and some of his buddies:
A garment worker from the East End, he had already seen political street-fighting, was a regular draw at Communist Party meetings...
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Justice, Spanish Style
According to today's issue of Público:
1. Judge Baltasar Garzón initiates an investigation into the forced disappearance and/or assasination of 113,000 Spaniards by Francoist forces.
2. Judge Baltasar Garzón is accused of judicial malfeasance (prevaricación) for having initiated that investigation, and is suspended from his post as a Judge.
3. An Argentine judge, invoking...
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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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