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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Iñaki Gabilondo interviewed Judge Baltasar Garzón on his last news program for CNN+ last week. Garzón repeated that his conscience is clear, but that there is a considerable likelihood that the cases brought against him, which had him suspended from his post at the national Criminal Court, will end his judicial career in Spain...
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Director Michael Mann has found his leads for Capa, his Hollywood production about Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, Cinema Blend reports:
According to Total Film, Andrew Garfield has been cast as Capa himself, while Gemma Arterton will play his partner and lover Gerda Taro. The script will reportedly follow the...
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With the twentieth ratification, the UN Convention against Enforced Disappearance took effect on December 23. The convention defines an enforced disappearance as occurring when authorities deprive an individual of liberty and then refuse to provide information regarding the person's fate or whereabouts. Human Rights Watch welcomed the news:
The...
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Alexei Barrionuevo reports in the New York Times:
Jorge Videla, a former Argentine dictator, was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday in the murder of 31 political prisoners who were killed after the 1976 coup that swept him into power. Mr. Videla, 85, is considered to have...
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The autonous government of Madrid has initiated an investigation of the theft of newborn babies who were then given up for adoption, a practice reported to have occurred in the Franco years, El País reports. The parents were told their child had died. The preliminary investigation, which focuses on the 1960s, is meant...
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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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