More sad news: we've just learned that Maynard Goldstein passed away earlier this week, joining Matti Mattson and Nate Thornton in the group of veterans we have lost this year. Maynard published a memoir, "Baseball in España," in a recent issue of the Volunteer. He also spoke eloquently at the October 16th "Songs...
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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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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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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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Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
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Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
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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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