The ALBA website features several full-fledged thematic introductions and lesson plans, such as this unit on Jewish volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, prepared by Peter N. Carroll, Fraser M. Ottanelli and Rajel Ibañes Sperber:
Jewish men and women accounted for over one fourth of all international volunteers and played a prominent...
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The AP's Daniel Woolls reports:
A Spanish association of people searching for lost children or parents filed a petition Thursday with the attorney general to investigate allegations that newborns were stolen from their mothers and sold to other families for decades, including as recently as the mid-1990s. The petition was signed by around...
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Pascale Bonnefoy reports for the NY Times:
A Chilean judge has opened the first official investigation into the death of former President Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Socialist who died during the 1973 military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Mr. Allende, 65,...
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About a third of the 2,800 volunteers who left from the United States to help defend the Spanish Republic died in Spain. Of the survivors, many went on to fight fascism during World War II in the U.S. Armed Forces. An extensive selection of their letters home was published in 2006 as The...
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The Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI) has been gathering photographs of International Brigade monuments worldwide, from London, Amsterdam, and San Francisco to Belfast, Seattle, and Stockholm. Click here for an overview; send information on any missing monuments to the AABI at aabi@brigadasinternacionales.org
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Spanish postage stamp from 1937 celebrating Spain/US relations.
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Two images of political strife in Little Spain (West 14th St) during the Spanish Civil War.
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Tomorrow, Thursday Jan. 27th, ALBA's Peter N. Carroll will present the second set of Spanish Civil War screenings at the San Franciso Museum of Modern Art, including Le Retour (Cartier-Bresson, 1944-45, 33 min), The Spanish Earth (Ivens, 1937, 52 min), and Guernica (Resnais/Hessens, 1950, 13 min). Phyllis Wattis Theater, 7:00 p.m. Made at the end of...
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Jim Jump writes with sad news:
I’m sorry to have to report that Jack Edwards, veteran of the battles of Jarama, Teruel and the Ebro and a cheerful and loyal friend to many people in the IBMT, died this morning (26 January 2011) in hospital in Telford at the age of...
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As the war in Spain dragged on, divisions among the Spaniards in New York became more and more pronounced. The pro-Republican paper “Frente Popular” regularly “outed” the city’s Spaniards who were pro-Franco or insufficiently pro-Republic. “Figures of the Spanish Colony of NY, who, because they are fascists are in part responsible for the horrible...
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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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