To the surprise of many, El País reports, the programming for the Berlin Film Festival this February includes a feature-length documentary about Baltasar Garzón by the Catalan director Isabel Coixet (The Secret Life of Words, My Life Without Me), based on a long interview that the novelist Manuel Rivas held with...
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A propos of Susie Linfield's new book on Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and others, Jed Perl reflects in The New Republic on the importance of "great photojournalism":
Photojournalists are yesterday’s heroes. ... Few photographers are any longer seen as providing definitive information about some national or international trouble spot, at...
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Another clip from Facing Fascism:
"No pasarán"--"They shall not pass"--was the antifascist rallying call throughout the war. The phrase referred to the defense of Madrid from the Fascist onslaught. A Spanish cigar maker living in Tampa, Florida, composed a song with those words as the refrain; it was recorded on a...
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Earlier this week, the Diario de Teruel covered the trip of a group of family members of Abraham Lincoln Brigade took this past fall to visit some of the Brigade's "sites of memory":
Viento glacial, aire siberiano y frío ártico son algunos de los adjetivos con los que el escritor y...
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Juan María Gómez Ortiz sends this image of Maynard Goldstein at the Jarama front, in the spring of 1937, which illustrates the cover of the Spanish edition of Harry Fisher's book Comrades. He writes:
The photo was taken by Sam Walters. Harry Fisher was very close to Maynard all along his life and...
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Jay Greenfield was 5 years old when his brother Hy enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; James D. Fernández interviewed him for the Facing Fascism exhibit. Read Hy's letters home here. Video here.
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An interview with Abe Osheroff. Video here.
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From the January 15th issue of the Times:
GOLDSTEIN--Maynard, 2 December 1913-12 January 2011. On October 16, 2010, Maynard Goldstein--the last surviving veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought at Jarama--spoke at a benefit event for the Archives of the Vets. He spoke passionately, bringing to life the streets of New York in...
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With thanks to James D. and Andrés Fernández, ALBA is proud to present its own YouTube channel, featuring more than a dozen new clips, including this interview with Milt Wolff, made for the 2007 exhibit Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War.
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President Obama has finally received his long-promised gift. The January 1937 portrait by Catalan photographer Agustí Centelles of a young Afro-Cuban volunteer who had headed for Spain from New York, where he was living as a political exile, has made it to the White House, Catalan Television reports. Centelles' sons, who had originally...
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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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