"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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Calling for a no-fly zone over Libya, Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said in a speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva that "we should never forget Guernica," The Australian reports. "Guernica is known throughout the world for the bombing of the civilian population. We have seen evidence of that in Libya....
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This week's New York Times Magazine features an 8.300-word piece by Jennifer Egan on Lori Berenson, the US woman who served 15 years in a Peruvian prison for abetting a left-wing terrorist plot in Perú:
In 1980, when Lori was 11, three American nuns were murdered in El Salvador. “That stayed...
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An hour-long BBC radio program broadcast this past Sunday--with several new and many archival interviews, and the participation of Richard Baxell and Paul Preston-- can now be listened to online, here.
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Next week, March 8-10, the Universidad Complutense in Madrid will feature a three-day event (program here in pdf) on the International Brigades, organized by the AABI (Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales) and the Facultad de Bellas Artes, with the goal of exploring the idea of an IB memorial on the university...
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Jorge Videla and Reynaldo Bignone, former military leaders of Argentina, are being accused of overseeing the systematic theft of babies from political prisoners. Their trial has opened, the BBC reports:
More than 100 children are known to have been given for adoption to military or police couples. The long-awaited trial,...
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Benicassim remembers the IB Hospital, Friday, March 4. Guillermo Casañ, who has carried out extensive research on the IB Hospital in Benicassim, will lead a guided tour of IB related sites in the coastal town. Program: II JORNADES MEMÒRIA HISTÒRICA BENICÀSSIM Viernes 4 de marzo, 2011 17:00 Antiguo apeadero del tren de Las Villas...
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Suze Rotolo, 1943 – 2011 The press is reporting the sad news of the death of Suze Rotolo, the American artist, teacher and political activist who was Bob Dylan’s companion and muse in the early 1960s. Rotolo is frequently credited with Dylan’s awakening to politics. According to one obituary she took the “then fairly...
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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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The iconic group portrait of raggedy Lincoln Brigade volunteers that’s become ALBA’s calling card over the years is now finally available in an uncropped, high-res print. When and where was it taken? And who exactly are these 29 men?
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Tina Modotti and Vittorio Vidali, who dedicated a major part of their lives to the Communist International, have long been surrounded by myth. New research by the historian David Jorge suggests that they consistently strove for broad leftist fronts—even when the leadership of the Comintern favored other tactics.
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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
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Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
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Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
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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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