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 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 legendary anti-Francoist Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura, whose classic Cría cuervos (1975) has just been theatrically re-released in the UK, speaks with The Guardian's Giles Tremlett:
Saura, now 79, has little cause to remember his own childhood with nostalgia, since he is old enough to remember the most painful event in Spain's recent history:...
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Picasso's daughter-in-law doesn't like the political nature of latest exhibit at the Picasso museum in Málaga. The Independent's Andrew Birch covers the story:
The new show, "Viñetas en el frente" (Cartoons on the front line), is unashamedly partisan, consisting of Republican posters and cartoons from the Spanish Civil War, and famous anti-Nazi...
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The July issue of In These Times features a long excerpt of the speech Judge Garzón gave at ALBA's annual event in New York after accepting the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. The excerpt will be available online on June 28.
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Our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust are organizing a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the creation of the International Brigades, on July 2, 2011, at 12:30pm at the Jubilee Gardens IB Memorial, featuring music and speakers. For more information see the flyer (pdf).
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The Tate Modern's Marko Daniel--co-curator of Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, up until September--blogs on Miró's Still Life with an Old Shoe, often considered to be the Catalan painter's "Guernica":
Just before starting on the still-life he wrote, ‘We are living through a terrible drama, everything happening in Spain is terrifying...
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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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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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