Several years ago, when the Museum of the City of New York was gearing up for its show “Facing Fascism:  New York and the Spanish Civil War,” we realized that while we knew a good deal about how some communities or groups in New York had responded to the outbreak of the war in...
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Suze Rotolo, 1943 – 2011 The press is reporting the sad news of the death of Suze Rotolo, the American artist, teacher and political activist who was Bob Dylan’s companion and muse in the early 1960s.  Rotolo is frequently credited with Dylan’s awakening to politics.  According to one obituary she took the “then fairly...
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In 1940, Francisco Franco, using the pseudonym Jaime de Andrade, authored a treatment for a screenplay, titled “Raza :  Story lines for a film script.”  The following year, the script was made into a feature-length film, produced by the government. The original text and the 1941 film are invaluable documents, as they offer us...
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The thousands of documents, images and artifacts that make up the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives can mean different things to different people. To the veterans and their immediate friends and family, the Archives are, among other things, a repository of the personal papers and effects of loved ones, a kind of extended and collective...
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Opening statement from the US Department of State, from the publication “The Spanish Government and the Axis,” a collection of the wartime correspondence between Franco, Hitler and Mussolini which was discovered in Germany in 1945: THE GOVERNMENTS of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America have exchanged views with regard to...
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I recently stumbled across a WikiLeaks-like March 1945 letter by FDR to the new US Ambassador in Madrid, saying that the US government will hold its nose and maintain relations with the Franco regime, but that it repudiates the origins and ideology of the regime. Little did I know that this brief archival document...
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Today I visited NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, which is hosting (until March 26, 2011) a lovely exhibition titled “Concrete Improvisations:  Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente.”  I was accompanied by Julia Newman, former Executive Director of ALBA, who is also the creator of the film “Into the Fire:  American Women and the Spanish Civil...
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"Expel the invader!" Posters contextualize events by inserting them into a series, into a narrative. In a subgroup of Republican Spanish Civil War posters, the struggle of the Republic against the forces of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini is likened to the popular resistance against the French invaders of 1808.
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The wikileaks affaire has given us a glimpse  into the private language of diplomacy, into the kinds of things that diplomats say to each other and to their bosses when they think their remarks are off the record. Historians have always placed great value on diplomatic communiqués for precisely this reason, though they usually...
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Last year, when Sebastiaan Faber and I tried to identify the black IBer portrayed in a picture by the great photographer Centelles, we came across a great many documents that would help a patient historian tell the relatively unknown story of the US-based volunteers from Spain and from Spanish-speaking America who joined...
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