Tickets for ALBA's annual celebrations in New York and the Bay Area can now be purchased online. The New York program–on May 14th, at the Eisner/Lubin auditorium on Washington Square, New York City (tickets here)–will feature Judge Baltasar Garzón, who will receive the first ALBA-Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, alongside Michael...
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The Independent sent a reporter on the annual Jarama walk, in which veterans, family members and sympathizers commemorate the first major battle action the International Brigades saw in Spain. (Meanwhile, efforts continue to locate the graves of the thousands of soldiers who died during the bloody battle.) Stephen Kelly's long piece appears...
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Yesterday's San José Mercury News features an obituary of Hank Rubin, the Lincoln vet and well-known Bay Area food critic who passed away in February:
Long before Chez Panisse was born, before Berkeley's Schoolyard Garden was sown, and healthy, wholesome, local food became such bywords, there was the Pot Luck, a small Berkeley...
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Manus O'Riordan, Ireland Secretary of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, writes to let us know that the Irish language TV channel TG4 has placed temporarily back online the song “Roll Away the Stone” which he sang on May Day 2009 at the funeral of Jack James Larkin Jones, President of the...
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The conflict in Libya has stirred up memories of, and analogies with, the Spanish Civil War. Earlier this month, Australian foreign minister Kevin Rudd warned of aerial bombing campaigns, stating that "we should never forget Guernica." Later, Tony Karon in Time magazine considered to what extent 2011 Libya is comparable to 1936 Spain:
The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has just uploaded a 105-minute video recording of a visit by Lincoln vet Lou Gordon to the Spanish class of Professor Noël Valis (now at Yale). Watch the video here.
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At the presentation yesterday of The Power of Reason, the book and DVD based on his interview with novelist Manuel Rivas and Isabel Coixet's prize-winning documentary Listening to Judge Garzón, Baltasar Garzón said he fully expects to lose his trials in front of the Spanish Supreme Court. But, he added, "I have never moved...
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At the memorial gathering on March 6 in honor of Lincoln vet Nate Thornton, who passed away on January 2, poet and playwrite Angelina Llongueras read her poem in tribute of him:
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Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis write in Common Dreams on the case of Bradley Manning--the army intelligence office who allegedly leaked tens of thousands of State Department cables to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, exposing cover-ups of potential war crimes and other irregularities:
The lesson is clear, and soldiers take note: You're better off...
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Anna Grau, New York correspondent to the Spanish newspaper ABC, has just published a moving tribute to Maynard Goldstein, the last surviving Lincoln veteran to fight in the battle of Jarama, who passed away in January:
It was inhumanely cold in New York some weeks ago when I went out into the...
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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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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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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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