Ileana Gadea Rivas sends us "I am an International," a brief oral history based on conversations with Nate Thornton held in 2007 and 2008. Read the pdf here. The article was published in Spanish and English in Words and Silences/Palabras y Silencios: Journal of the International Oral History Association (vol. 5, number 1, November 2009), and...
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The Spanish Civil War film screenings in San Francisco later this month (see earlier post) will include With the Lincoln Brigade in Spain, the recently recovered twenty-minute film by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert Kline (clip here). More details will be posted soon.
The re-publication this month of my memoir, Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia & the Art of History (University of Georgia Press), may be of interest to those who wonder how and why I got involved in writing about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Spanish Civil War. I’ll be discussing this background on Thursday January...
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Georgia Wever writes with sad news:
Alasdair Fotheringham in today's Independent:
"Did my child die or was he kidnapped?" is something no parent should ever have to ask, and still less so when the kidnappers are the government. But that is exactly the question hundreds of Spanish families are currently demanding that their courts resolve for once...
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At Spanish Cinema Now, James van Maanen saw En el balcón vacío (Jomí García Ascot, 1961), a rarely shown film made by, and about, Spanish Civil War exiles in Mexico City:
A memory piece that shows us a grown women living in Mexico City who travels back to Spain to...
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Diana Hauk Payne, widow of ALB vet Perley B. Payne, passed away earlier this month. The San José Mercury has an obituary:
Perley had recently returned from the Spanish Civil War when they met at a political gathering. They married in 1939 and lived on a fruit ranch and raised...
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This past Wednesday, Margot Adler covered the Spanish Civil War photography exhibit for NPR's Morning Edition:
What's fascinating at the exhibit is that you can look at scores of tiny prints on contact sheets, frame by frame and then see what finally appears in photo news magazines like Look, or in...
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Alan Entin, nephew of Bernard "Butch" Entin, traveled to Spain this fall together with Josie Nelson (daughter of Steve Nelson) and Vaughn Parker, brother of Clinton DeWitt. Alan sends us an article (pdf) about his experience. See here for the travel blog by Alan Warren, the trip organizer.
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Carol Rosenburg writes in the Miami Herald on the role played by Florida senator Mel Martínez in US efforts to influence Spanish investigations into torture at Guantánamo:
The cause for alarm at the U.S. Embassy was what a U.S. diplomat called a "well documented'' 12-inch-tall dossier compiled by a Spanish human rights...
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New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.
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On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
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In 1944, Barsky wrote A Surgeon Goes to War, an 18-chapter memoir of his time in Spain, which was never published but can be consulted at NYU’s Tamiment Library. This is the first chapter.
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Self-effacing and shy though he was, Dr. Edward Barsky’s experience in Spain made him an outspoken activist, tireless organizer, innovative frontline surgeon, and political prisoner. “Eddie is a saint,” Hemingway wrote. “That’s where we put our saints in this country—in jail.”
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The Volunteer is thrilled to honor Dr. Barsky on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
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For Edward Barsky, political and humanitarian activism were two sides of the same coin. Those who persecuted him begged to differ.
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The time she spent in civil-war Spain loomed large in the life of Martha Gellhorn, the St. Louis-born war journalist. “The truth is that Martha could not stop thinking, feeling, and writing about her Spanish experiences.” “Objectivity bullshit.” That’s what Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) called the journalism of her day. Her letters to personalities like...
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Among the thousands of Jewish volunteers who joined the International Brigades were many descendants of the Sephardim. What was it like for them to “return” to Spain? Three case studies: Lini de Vries, César Covo, and Samuel Nahman, aka Manny Harriman.
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How the 22-year-old Jewish American dancer Janet Riesenfeld performed flamenco to help raise money for the Second Republic under fascist attack.
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Why did Jawaharlal Nehru, future prime minister of India, visit civil-war Spain in 1938? As it turned out, the triangular relationship between Britain, Spain, and India had deep cultural and geopolitical implications.
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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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