Matti Mattson, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, died while in hospice at JFK Hospital Atlantis, Florida, on January 11, 2011.
Mattson was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. He completed one year of high school and then studied at the B.F. Brown Junior High School, where he took an elective course in printing. He then worked...
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Arts & Letters Daily just picked up Dan Kaufman's long piece in the Nation on the Spanish Civil War photography (the "Mexican Suitcase") on display at the International Center of Photography. (Earlier coverage here; pdf here.) The show’s stunning, must-have, 2-volume catalog is now for sale at...
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Renowned Lorca scholar Christopher Maurer--editor of the poet's Collected Poems--was doing research in the music division of the Library of Congress when he came across a manuscript of one of the poems of Poet in New York, including a set of previously unknown verses. The Guardian has the goods:
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From the Hollywood Reporter:
Alex de la Iglesia's A Sad Trumpet Ballad took 15 nominations for the Spanish Film Academy's Goya Awards, ... De la Iglesia's film, set against the Spanish Civil War and focusing on two circus clowns in love with the same person.
More here; see also the Volunteer'sToday's selection from the archives of the Village Voice covers an anti-war demonstration in November 1971:
Why are you marching? I ask the only three blacks who had showed up at the assembly point for blacks, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Asian-Americans. Why? I ask the head of an eight-man Chinese dragon...
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"Relatives of local veterans of the Spanish Civil War are campaigning for a war memorial in Hull," the BBC reports:
Eight men from Hull volunteered to fight for the Republican forces when the conflict started in 1936. ... The eight men are commemorated by a small plaque in Hull City...
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Hazel Healy writes in the Los Angeles Times on Spanish families' efforts to seek truth and justice:
Emilia Girón never forgot her second son. She wanted to name him Jesús, but he was taken from her in the hospital to be baptized and was never returned. He was stolen while she...
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On April 14th, 2011--as it happens, the eightieth anniversary of the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic-- a major Joan Miró retrospective opens at Tate Modern:
The exhibition also traces an anxious and politically engaged side to Miró’s work that reflects his passionate response to one of the most turbulent...
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David Pryce-Jones, writing in the Wall Street Journal, does not find much to praise in Stanley Payne's new Spain: A Unique History:
It is far from obvious why Mr. Payne leaves out much that is familiar and that would have served either to reinforce or to refute stereotypes. ... The...
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New Hampshire's NH Outlook will dedicate part of its weekly program this Thursday to the Lincoln Brigade. More here. Once broadcast, the program can be viewed on demand here.
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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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