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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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....
Read more »
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.
Read more »
Balada triste de trompeta, Alex de la Iglesia´s new film, partly set during the Spanish Civil War, which premiered at Toronto a couple of weeks ago, is now competing for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Today's El País features a positive review and an interview with the...
Read more »
The Spanish Supreme Court announced yesterday that, at a session held in late July, it voted to reject the appeal filed by Judge Baltasar Garzón in his trial for prevaricación, or knowingly overstepping his judicial boundaries, and not to allow Garzón's defense to call on other judges as expert witnesses on crimes without statute...
Read more »
EFE reports that former Chilean president Michele Bachelet, visiting in Spain last week, defended the need for historical memory and, in particular, the way in which Chile has dealt with its repressive past through judicial means--notably different from Spain. In response to a question about the controversy surrounding Judge Garzón's attempt to open...
Read more »
This morning's issue of El País highlights the exhibit "La Colonia, Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898-1945," curated by ALBA's James D. Fernández and co-sponsored by ALBA and the K Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at NYU, opening September 17th at 6:15pm. Through some sixty family photographs and other objects, the show...
Read more »
A lengthy obituary by G.W. Bowersock in The New Republic:
Not far from Madrid he received a serious wound to his neck and right shoulder that brought him close to death. He later recalled that as the blood drained out of him he had felt full of rage that he was...
Read more »
EITB reports:
A court in Argentina has reopened an investigation into killings committed during the Spanish Civil War and the early years of the Franco dictatorship, such as human rights groups and families of victims requested, court officials reported this week. The court overturned a previous...
Read more »
On September 25th, as part of the Hay Festival in Segovia, judge Baltasar Garzón will be interviewed about developments in Universal Justice by Eduardo Martín de Pozuelos, who covers terrorism for La Vanguardia. More information here.
Read more »
At the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair, Kevin Doyle interviewed the young Spanish Anarchist Manuel García:
We are very involved with the movement to recover historical memory. But not only in the sense of identifying the victims and what happened in this and that situation. As anarchists we are also involved in order...
Read more »
The Film Archive(d) has posted the full 1983 TV debut of George Selden, in which the legendary journalist recounts his decades-long career, including his coverage of the Spanish Civil War:
Although George Seldes was one of the giants in the history of American journalism, particularly in the field of press...
Read more »
La Colonia: Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898-1945 (KJCC, Sept. 17-Dec.); Mexican Suitcase (ICP, Sept. 24-Jan.); Nueva York Roundtable (KJCC, Nov. 11).
Read more »
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