Within a couple of days' time, the last surviving German and Scottish volunteers of the Spanish Civil War, Fritz Teppich and Thomas Watters, passed away. Victor Grossman sends us a note on Teppich (below); an obit from Neues Deutschland is here (in German). A BBC obit for Watters is here; a brief...
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In an ostensible attempt to save face, the Spanish Supreme Court absolved Judge Baltasar Garzón yesterday from "prevarication," or knowingly making a decision against the law, in relation to Garzón's opening of an investigation into crimes against humanity committed by the Franco regime during and after the Spanish Civil War (NYTimes, Guardian)....
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ALBA's James D. Fernández is interviewed by the Spanish press about the baffling court case around Garzón's stay as holder of NYU's King Juan Carlos I Chair. The case was eventually closed. Read the interview here (in Spanish).
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The online magazine FronteraD just published a polemical review (in Spanish) by me of a David Rieff's polemical book Against Remembrance. Read it here.
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James D. Fernández, vice-chair of ALBA and professor of Spanish at NYU, has an op-ed in today's El País commenting on some of the more Kafkaesque chapters of the witch-hunt against Judge Garzón--and the collateral damage inflicted on those who found themselves in the crossfire. Read the piece here.
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Rickard Jorgensen, who has generously supported the development of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade collection at NYU's Tamiment library, writes:
After much work by Mike Nash, Gail Malmgreen, Elizabeth Compa, Evan Daniel, Laura Helton, Julie Kessle, Porsche Martin and Jessica Weglein, the "Randall: Fifteenth International Brigade Photograph Collection" and the "Photograph International Brigades...
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The Basque city of Gernika will be commemorating the 75th anniversary of the April 26, 1937 bombing during the Spanish Civil War with a series of events starting this month. See the full program here (pdf).
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The historian Ronald Fraser, author Blood of Spain, has died in Spain, where he lived. Blood of Spain, Tariq Ali writes in The Guardian, "is a peerless account of the Spanish civil war, carefully constructed from interviews with participants on both sides":
Conducted with a steady and consistently courteous voice, the...
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The Mexican Suitcase, Trisha Ziff’s brilliant documentary about the re-discovery in Mexico of 4,500 Spanish Civil War photographic negatives of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour, will be part of the line-up of "Cine México" in Tucson, Arizona, later this month (February 29-March 4). All screenings and events are free and...
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"The secrets from a vault of moldy documents long covered in bat and rat droppings could soon help to put former top Guatemalan officials behind bars, years after the country's brutal civil war ended in 1996," Mica Rosenberg and Kieran Murray write for Reuters:
Clues found in the millions of police documents...
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Adrian Pole’s sharp-eyed and sensitive new book notices what so many historians have missed about the International Brigades: that this army was filled with Spanish recruits. Interactions with everyday Spaniards made up a substantial chunk of foreign soldiers’ days in the rearguard. Due to the high mortality of Brigade units, maintaining fighting readiness demanded...
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Amirah Inglis’s (1926-2015) collection of photographs assembled for her research on Australians in the Spanish Civil War (1987) is posted on JSTOR’s website. The collection includes 119 images varying from pamphlet covers, post cards, to photographs of volunteers who supported the Spanish Republic at home, and of volunteers who went to Spain. Inglis planned...
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After attending the AABI event honoring the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Madrid, in February 2025, Anita Caref, a retired adult literacy educator, started an antifascist children’s book club.
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Ca-Vostra, a bar-hotel in the historic center of Ibiza Town that the Austrian painter Lene Schneider-Kainer opened in 1933, served for years as a refuge for artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazism—until she herself was forced into exile. Sol Izquierdo reconstructs a remarkable life.
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, New York’s Volunteers In the spring semester of 2020, the first thirty-three students completed biographical sketches that were published to a student-built website. Stuyvesant High School teacher David Hanna declared his goal for students to compile biographical entries for each of the approximately 800 volunteers who went to Spain from...
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A new episode of the podcast “Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War” is now available. In the podcast, which premiered in October 2024, historians Patricia Schechter and Dan Czitrom discuss the impact of the Spanish war on their and others’ families. This episode features the children of Anna and Alvin Warren. Below is a...
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In 2025 the fourth stage of ALBA’s Passport Project wrapped up. The fourth stage focused on volunteers on whom we have very little information to enable a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) search. Most of the volunteers submitted had at least a year of birth to reference. Expectations...
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On the fiftieth anniversary of Franco’s death, the New York Times published an article by Jason Horowitz about the “nostalgia” for Francisco Franco being expressed by a growing number of younger Spaniards, most of whom have no direct experience of the dictator. As is common these days in the Times’ coverage of any number...
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The family of Paul Andrew Mooney (1910-1961) is searching for documentation to substantiate information he provided to his family about serving in the International Brigades. Paul Mooney was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Hughes High School in 1929 and attended the University of Cincinnati in 1929, 1935 and 1936. In...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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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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