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 most recent issue of the journal History of Psychiatry features an article by Olga Villasante on "War Neurosis during the Spanish Civil War," focusing on the work of IB-member Gregorio Bermann (1894–1972), who "organized the frontline Neuropsychiatric Service at the Hospital de Chamartín de La Rosa (Madrid). Bermann wrote about his personal experience in the...
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This coming January, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is screening a series of Spanish Civil War films by Henri Cartier-Bresson and others: a first program on Jan. 20th, including Victoire de la vie (Cartier-Bresson and Herbert Kline, 1937, 47 min.) and L'Espagne vivra (Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1938, 44 min.), and a second program...
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They're done. After the much-publicized atttempt a year ago to locate the body of the poet Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated in August 1937, the autonomous government of Andalusia has declared that no new searches will be undertaken, El País reports. Officially the 70,000 euro search project aimed to recover the bodies...
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Stacey Guill, writing in the Hemingway Review, revisits Joris Ivens' pathbreaking documentary The Spanish Earth:
Ivens acknowledged the "artistic" or creative element to Hemingway's contributions during this period, recalling that Hemingway helped with "the general strategy of the film. He showed a quick comprehension and understanding of the documentary film...
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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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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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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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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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