Ed Tracey at the DailyKos pens a long post on his Spanish heroes, Baltasar Garzón and King Juan Carlos:
Garzón's trial is scheduled to begin this summer - and this is an individual we should keep in our thoughts and prayers, hoping that our opponents will not be able to...
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The Guardian's Jonathan Jones reflects on George Orwell and Joan Miró's engagement with the Spanish Civil War:
Miró, like Picasso, reacted with deep emotion to the plight of Spain. His paintings see the violence of civil war in an old shoe, in the prongs of a fork, in a colossal...
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Raul del Pozo has been awared the prestigious Premio Primavera de Novela (200,000 euros) for El reclamo, the story of an former anti-Franco guerrilla who is forced into exile in South America. More here (English) and here (Spanish).
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Spain's national criminal court, the Audiencia Nacional, has decided that the case for alleged torture perpetrated at the Guantánamo prison can go ahead. Judge Baltasar Garzón opened it in 2009, despite the resistance of the Attorney General and--as the WikiLeaks cables revealed--strong pressure from the US government and Congress. The case is conducted by...
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Spain's Supreme Court, El País reports, has rejected a request for annulment from the family of one of Spain's most renowned 20th-century poets, Miguel Hernández, who died in a Francoist prison in 1942, at age 31, after having been convicted of "aiding the rebellion"'--the perverse phrase with which Franco's Law of Political Responsibilities designated...
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Paul Preston's forthcoming book The Spanish Holocaust, an exhaustive study of violence and repression during and after the Spanish Civil War, has just been awarded the prestigious Premio de Historia de Catalunya Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal, Público reports. The book will go on sale in Spain this coming April; the English edition will...
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Agustí Villaronga's Pa negre (Black Bread) came out as clear winner in this week's Goya award ceremony (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars). The Catalan film is part of the line-up of the Portland International Film Festival this month. The Hollywood Reporter writes:
Agusti Villaronga's Black Bread won...
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The Courier reports:
Dundee volunteers who travelled to Spain over 70 years ago to fight fascism were commemorated on Saturday. The annual remembrance, organised by the Trades Union Council, was held at the memorial to the International Brigade in Albert Square. Taking part in the event along with union members were relatives...
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The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, together with the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights, has filed two submissions with the successor of Baltasar Garzón at Spain's Audiencia Nacional, who is investigating the accountability of US officials responsible for torture at Guantánamo Bay and other detention sites:
The first...
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Why did George W. Bush not go to Switzerland last week? Xavier Rauscher at International Jurist has the answer: He did not want to end up like Augusto Pinochet. As Geoff Pingree and I wrote in The Nation last May, the pioneering efforts of the Spanish judge "have ensured, for example, that Donald Rumsfeld...
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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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