"Expel the invader!" Posters contextualize events by inserting them into a series, into a narrative. In a subgroup of Republican Spanish Civil War posters, the struggle of the Republic against the forces of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini is likened to the popular resistance against the French invaders of 1808.
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The wikileaks affaire has given us a glimpse into the private language of diplomacy, into the kinds of things that diplomats say to each other and to their bosses when they think their remarks are off the record. Historians have always placed great value on diplomatic communiqués for precisely this reason, though they usually...
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Under the title History, Memory, Cinema, the Harvard Film Archive is screening a series of documentaries by Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán this month (Feb. 11-21):
Few filmmakers have understood the tremendous potential of cinema to shape historical consciousness as perspicaciously and courageously as Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán (b. 1941). In...
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The ArtDaily reports:
Work begins this week to add over 5 million digital objects, ranging from Spanish civil war photographs and handwritten letters from philosopher Immanuel Kant, to Europeana from 19 of Europe’s leading research and university libraries.
More here.This year's Portland International Film Festival (February 10-26) features several Spanish Civil War-inspired movies, including Alex de la Iglesia's The Last Circus (Balada triste de trompeta), Agustí Villaronga's Black Bread (Pa negre), and Oriol Porta's A War in Hollywood (Hollywood vs. Franco). More details here.
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The Iranian Press TV today features an item on the ongoing exhumations of mass graves in Spain. Includes 2:30 minute video.
After nearly four decades ... the Spanish government ratified a law authorizing exhumation of the war's mass graves. Since that time, however, a mere ten percent of the burials...
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Anne Chisholm, in this Sunday's Telegraph, and Michael Eaude, in the Independent, review Javier Cercas' Anatomy of a Moment, a prize-winning fictionalized history of the failed February 1981 coup:
The Anatomy of a Moment is extensively researched, rigorous with the facts. It is not only history, though, for where...
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A team of researchers directed by Luis Avial has been scanning the surroundings of the Jarama river--where the Lincoln Battalion faced its first bloody battle in February 1937--in search of the graves of fallen soldiers, La Razón reports. The researchers are confident they may well discover mass graves with the remains of British,...
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Ronald Fraser, author of the pathbreaking oral history Blood of Spain, reviews Julián Casanova's newly translated The Spanish Republic and Civil War (Cambridge, 2010) in the most recent issue of the New Left Review:
The belief that the Spanish Civil War can essentially be reduced to a struggle...
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Jim Jump sends us the new IBMT Newsletter with, as usual, a wealth of information: obits for Sam Lesser and Penny Feiwel, news on the Jubilee Gardens IB Memorial and a full overview of all UK memorials, information on the possible location of George Nathan's grave, an announcement of a new play on...
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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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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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On May 3, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice Community received the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism at a ceremony in New York City. Executive Director Audrey Sasson delivered the following acceptance speech.
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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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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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