The exhibit featuring the more than 4,000 Spanish Civil War images by Robert Capa, "Chim" Seymour and Gerda Taro that were recovered from the so-called "Mexican Suitcase" have begun their travels after their initial display at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. They are now on show in Arles, France, Artdaily...
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Re: Spain Confronts Years of Pain Over Lost Babies Congratulations are due to the New York Times for your excellent front-page coverage of this terrifying story. Many of us hope you might be able to give similar prominent coverage to a much larger and related story: that of the over 100,000 victims of the...
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The Orphan Film Symposium DVD containing the recovered and restored film With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, by Henri-Cartier-Bresson and Herb Kline, was just award for "Most Original Contribution to Film History" at the prestigious Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy. It was the scholar and ALBA friend Juan Salas who, while conducting research on...
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The British media are considering the ramifications of the information contained in the MI5 files on the Spanish Civil War and International Brigades that were released two days ago. Here is a piece in the Guardian by SCW scholar Tom Buchanan; here a segment on the topic from Channel 4 news with...
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Spanish Civil War scholar Len Tsou sends us the following note from Athens:
While waiting for a solution to sail for Gaza, I went to the rally at Syntagma square during the 48 Hrs general strike. I saw a familiar banner attached here.
The UK National Archives have just released a large cache of records related to the British participation in the Spanish Civil War. From the press release:
More volunteers may have left Britain with the aim of joining the International Brigades in Spain than previously thought according to documents discovered at The National Archives.
The Dartmouth Alumni magazine just ran this tribute I wrote a long time ago to one of my undergraduate mentors, Robert Russell. I thought it might be of interest to you ALBA blog readers as well. Salud. Why Blue?
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Spanish singer and songwriter, Javier Molina, has recorded a new version of "Jarama Valley"
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The media are overflowing with commemorations of Ernest Hemingway, who killed himself fifty years ago. Here's Clancy Sigal in The Guardian:
In previous months, he had submitted to more than 15 punishing ECT (electroshock convulsive) treatments at the Mayo clinic, due, in part, to his fear that the FBI was shadowing him....
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Our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust across the pond send along their press release about the 75th anniversary celebration on July 2 in London:
75th anniversary tribute to Spanish Civil War volunteers
British volunteers of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War will be remembered at 1pm on Saturday 2 July 2011 at the International...
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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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