After years of hard work,Carmen Negrín, the granddaughter of Spanish Republican Prime Minister Juan Negrín, is gratified, she tells the Spanish newspaper Público, to see her grandfather's voluminous papers turned into a major national archive. Meanwhile, ALBA board member Gabriel Jackson has just published a major biography of Negrín (review forthcoming in...
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La buena nueva (2008), a Spanish Civil War film directed by Helena Taberna and starring Bárbara Goenaga, received the Special Jury Prize for Acting at the Amsterdam Film Festival:
A young priest arrives in his first assignment to a small parish serving a working-class village in the first days of...
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A ceremony was held at the IB Memorial in London two days ago:
This was the first year that there were no veterans of the conflict at the annual celebration, although seven from Britain still survive and were awarded Spanish Passports by the Spanish Government in 2009 as a gesture...
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What exactly is the legal status of the hundreds of thousands of sentences issued by Francoist tribunals during and after the Civil War? To the frustration of many associated with the movement calling for a "recovery of historical memory," Spain's "Historical Memory Law" of 2007 did not include an a massive annulment of...
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Raphael Minder, writing in today's New York Times, talks about Spain's economic crisis with two dinosaurs of Spanish politics: Manuel Fraga, Franco's minister of propaganda in the sixties and later president of Galicia, and Santiago Carrillo, former secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party. For the latter, the crisis provides an opportunity...
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Last week Human Rights Watch issued a critical report on the work of the United Nations' Human Rights Council, founded in 2006 in place of the UN Commission on Human Rights and up for review in 2011. HRW's report takes a comprehensive look at the Council's successes and failures, calling on the...
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Seventy years ago, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the ruthless dictator of the Dominican Republic, welcomed the first group of Spanish Republican refugees, initiating one of the most contradictory and tragic episodes of the postwar Spanish diaspora--an event on whose commemoration in the DR Público reports today. Trujillo's generosity toward the thousands of Spaniards fleeing Franco and...
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In a rare interview, Garzón has told the Spanish radio network Cadena Ser that he is reasonably pessimistic about his career at this point. Speaking from the house of his friend José Saramago--the recently deceased Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize winner--where he participated in the presentation of a biography on the writer, Garzón...
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Amnesty International urges the parliament of Catalonia not to ban the use of full-face covering veils in public:
"Any wide-ranging ban will violate the rights to freedom of expression and religion of those women who choose to wear a full-face veil as an expression of their identity or beliefs," said...
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In a report released yesterday, Human Rights Watch calls out France, Germany, and Britain for using intelligence obtained in other countries through torture:
"Berlin, Paris, and London should be working to eradicate torture, not relying on foreign torture intelligence," said Judith Sunderland, senior Western Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch....
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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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