The Guardian's Giles Tremlett reports:
A country palace given to Spain's former fascist dictator, General Francisco Franco, to use as his summer house is to be expropriated from his family and donated to the people of the country town of Sada, north-west Spain. Franco used it for his summer holidays, when he...
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The Guardian has continued to post Spain-related memos from the WikiLeaks cache; here a piece by Giles Tremlett; here a memo on Garzón's investigation of torture at Guantánamo; here one in which Garzón is dubbed "anti-American":
He clearly has an anti-American streak (as evidenced by occasional scathing editorials in...
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Scott Horton writes:
Diplomats routinely monitor and report on legal cases that affect national interests. These cables show that the U.S. embassy in Madrid had far exceeded this mandate, however, and was actually successfully steering the course of criminal investigations, the selection of judges, and the conduct of prosecutors. Their...
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In its broadcast today, Democracy Now! talked with Scott Horton (Harper's) about the revelation from the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables that the U.S. has actively tried to thwart Spanish investigations, by judge Garzón and others, involving the American government. Watch the segments here and here.
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Geoff Lawes' indefatigable quest to compile a complete catalogue of songs inspired by the Spanish Civil War continues unabated. A recent post to Mudcat Café deals with a Woody Guthrie song about Lincoln Brigader Steve Nelson. See more discussion threads here.
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The U.S. government urged its Spanish counterpart in the spring of 2009 to stymie the investigation into torture and war crimes at Guantánamo initiated by judge Baltasar Garzón under the principle of universal jurisdiction, El País reports (see also The Guardian).
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In addition to the collections at UC San Diego and the Digital Library of Catalonia highlighted before, the U.S. Library of Congress has a collection of about 120 posters of the Spanish Civil War. Access it here.
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Mitchel Cohen talks with John Gerassi, son of Spanish Civil War veterans and author of The Premature Antifascists: North American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (1986) and, most recently, Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates:
Gerassi was writing for the NY Times in 1962 and later Newsweek...
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Dora Birnbach was born on Septmber 20, 1911 to a Jewish orthodox family in the town of Sokolov, Poland. She entered Spain on a small fishing boat with a doctor from Bulgaria, nurses from Poland and Romania, a former Canadian priest who brought money donated by Canadian workers for the Republic and a young...
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Peter Glazer's Radical Nostalgia: Spanish Civil War Commemoration in America (Rochester, 2005) has been reissued in paperback, just in time for the holiday season:
Radical Nostalgia asks and answers important questions about the meaning of memory and the politics of history. Peter Glazer's warm, empathetic, and insightful study of ceremonies...
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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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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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The first thirty-six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Phase IV were submitted December 30, 2024. Phase IV is intended to focus on volunteers on whom we have minimal information. At some point in the future, I plan to resubmit some volunteers who were returned as not found or on whom no information...
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My grandfather (Nana), Suresh, moved to the United States in 1959 as a young man on a student visa pursuing his master’s degree. His parents, my great grandparents, sought value in being ‘foreign educated’ and bringing his education home – to Mumbai, India to run their family business. 2 years after my Nana moved...
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Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80. Born in New York City in 1943 to a secular Jewish family, Peter grew up in the Bronx and Queens, where his father worked as a composer,...
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LA RÉPUBLIQUE -QUOTIDINEN DE COMBAT RADICAL ET SOCIALISTE, February 5, 1938 Foreign Volunteer Arrested On March 27 last, 29 North Americans were arrested on board the boat Sans-Pareil while they were attempting to reach the Spanish Coast. They were sentenced to a prison term for violating the decree of February 18, 1937 on the...
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The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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The Spanija series translates select autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google Translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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Peter Verburgh’s translation from the French Newpaper Le Journal about a group of 29 Americans arrested in France. “29 American Volunteers Arrested in Muret” Le Journal, 5 April 1937 Toulouse, 4 April- The Control services of the Non-Intervention Committee do not remain inactive, especially with the help of the French Police and Gendarmerie. Thus...
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ALBA Board Member Steve Birnbaum made the trek on Memorial Day to the Home of Eternity Cemetary in Oakland, California to pay tribute to ALB veteran Hans Joachim. Joachim was born in Berlin, Germany in 1906 and moved to the US in 1924. He served in Spain with the George Washington Battalion and later...
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Please find attached photos of my visits to the graves of Lester Rowlson and Tersil Obriot last weekend. I left a brigade flag and a fresh white rose at each. ,,, I was also proud to include aspects of my Clapton CFC scarf; you might have heard of this small football club in London that...
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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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