The Club Julio A. Mella in Spanish Harlem was named after the founder of Cuba’s Communist party. The exhibition “Nueva York: 1613 – 1945” (New-York Historical Society and Museo del Barrio), featured the original of this painting of that club by Henry Glintenkamp, as part of the exhibition’s final section. In this closing sequence...
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After a decade of research, Prof. Paul Preston at the London School of Economics has just finished writing The Spanish Holocaust, which tallies, narrates, and explains the tremendous cost in human lives and suffering of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. The book, which has already won a prize, will be out...
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As I mentioned in an earlier post, the curators of the museum show “Nueva York: 1613 – 1945” (New-York Historical Society, Museo del Barrio) used the Spanish Civil War in New York as a kind of provisional endpoint for the exhibition’s sweeping narrative about Spanish-speakers in Gotham. The exhibition showed how the war brought...
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Goodbye Barcelona, a musical by Karl Lewkowicz and Judith Johnson about the International Brigades, is scheduled to open for a four-week run in London in November. A fund-raising reading of songs from the show was held in London on Friday 4 March; speakers included historian Paul Preston, novelist Victoria Hislop and Lola Ruiz...
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Today in the Chronicle, Bob Egelko reviews the ramifications of the WikiLeaks revelations regarding US pressure on foreign governments and judiciaries to block legal investigation of US officials, including the Guantánamo torture case opened by Baltasar Garzón:
The documents also quoted U.S. diplomats as urging Spain to transfer the case from Judge...
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ChristieBooks has just posted an English translation of Julián Casanova's op-ed in El País from last month, comparing Chile to Spain:
Pinochet learned a lot from Franco. ... The legacy of the crimes of the two dictatorships was tackled very differently in the two countries. In Spain, in the wake...
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According to today’s literary supplement of El País (Babelia), Jorge M. Reverte has published a new book in which he reconstructs the history of an important part of Francoist Spain’s support of Hitler and Nazism during World War II. The Spanish falangist José Luis Arrese proposed the name “División Azul” to refer to the...
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"Don't mess with Wisconsin," Christopher Hitchens tells his Vanity Fair readers this week, recalling the state's solid progressive tradition:
To make a stop in Madison, either as author or speaker or both, used to be no ordinary part of a radical tour. You bumped up against a tradition that went back a...
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Several years ago, when the Museum of the City of New York was gearing up for its show “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War,” we realized that while we knew a good deal about how some communities or groups in New York had responded to the outbreak of the war in...
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As the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, has announced an investigation of Qaddafi and his circle for possible crimes against humanity, El País reports that judge Baltasar Garzón, who has been working at the ICC since his suspension from Spain's criminal court last May, will serve as advisor...
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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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