In the first piece of positive judicial news for Judge Baltasar Garzón in a long time, the Supreme Court has announced the recusal of five of the seven Supreme Court justices initially assigned to the tribunal in charge of judging Garzón for alleged abuse of power when opening an investigation into crimes committed by...
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The death earlier this week of the Spanish-French novelist Jorge Semprún Maura at age 87 has spurred dozens of reflections on the importance of his life and work--both intimately tied up with the major events and movements of the twentieth century. Semprún, who wrote most of his books in French, was the son of...
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PBS's History Detectives airing on June 28, 2011, includes a moving episode on the friendship between Lincoln Brigaders Sol Fellman and Doug Roach, featuring interviews with Matti Mattson and ALBA's Jim Fernández. View the whole 18-minute segment  here. Be sure to check the listings of your local PBS station for more details. Read more »

A Moment in the Sun, the monumental new historical novel by ALBA board member John Sayles, is praised by Tom LeClair in this weekend's Times book review:

“A Moment in the Sun” is, it should be said, nearly 1,000 pages long. Sayles responds to readers’ presumed resentment against its bulk (a resentment...
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The uproar continues around Diccionario Biográfico Español, whose first 25 volumes were released last week by the Royal Academy of History, as the Spanish Parliament is demanding a thorough revision. The Financial Times covers the controversy; and I joined in on a collective op-ed that appeared yesterday in Público:

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The New Yorker's Dan Kaufman had lunch with Baltasar Garzón when he was in New York in May to receive the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism:

“My family on my father’s side was more progressive, while on my mother’s side they were more conservative,” Garzón said. His mother’s brother, Gabriel,...
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The amount of archival materials related to the Spanish Civil War that are being made available online keeps growing. The Archivo Rojo, managed by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, provides a stunning number of photographs (more than 3,000)  gathered by the Junta Delegada de Defensa de Madrid to denounce the atrocities committed by...
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A "relentlessly harrowing read": that is how Nick Lyne characterizes The Spanish Holocaust, Paul Preston's new book on the repression during and after the Spanish Civil War, which was published in Spanish earlier this year and is due out in the UK next spring:

provides, page after page, factual, documentary accounts...
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Shortly after the exhumation of Chilean President Salvador Allende, whose long-assumed suicide has now been called into question, the Communist Party of Chile has called for an investigation into the death of Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda, who also died in 1973, alleging that he may have been poisoned. The BBC reports that...
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Nicolai Ouroussoff reviews a fascinating exhibit in Montreal on architecture during World War II, which "opens with two images — one depicting the half-crumbled ruins of Guernica after the April 1937 Nazi terror bombings, the other showing two women wandering across the wasteland of Hiroshima, umbrellas in hand, on a wet day sometime...
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