The Wall Street Journal's Richard Woodward writes a belated review of the "Mexican Suitcase" SCW photography exhibit:
What assistant curator Cynthia Young and her team have done with this material in less than three years is valiant. Along with reprinting a select group of photographs from the negatives for an...
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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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Marci Rubin, daughter of Lincoln Veteran Henry Mortimer “Hank” Rubin reports that her father passed away this morning in San Francisco.
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The thousands of documents, images and artifacts that make up the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives can mean different things to different people. To the veterans and their immediate friends and family, the Archives are, among other things, a repository of the personal papers and effects of loved ones, a kind of extended and collective...
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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 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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