The most prestigious literary award in Spain, the Planeta, went to Eduardo Mendoza’s latest novel, Riña de gatos. Madrid 1936 (Cat Fight; Madrid, 1936) on Oct. 15th, according to El País.
Eduardo Mendoza competed against 508 other novelists, mostly from Spain and Latin America, to win the 601,000 euro prize.
In his acceptance speech,...
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Today's El País Emilio Silva writes a combative op-ed to mark the 10-year anniversary of the day that volunteers began digging in Priaranza del Bierzo to look for the remains of his grandfather, executed during the Spanish Civil War. Soon after, Silva founded the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica:
The Edinburgh Anarchists have been kind enough to post a review essay on Scots volunteers in Spain, published last year by Stuart Christie (of Christie Books, which this blog has featured before) in the Scottish Review of Books:
A new and fascinating contribution to Scotland’s role in...
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Gail Dolgin, the associate producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary Forever Activists: Stories of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, directed by ALBA board member Judy Montell, has died, the Oakland Tribune reports:
Dolgin was a longtime board member of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, a proposal reviewer for...
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The BBC reports:
A plaque with the names of those from Merseyside who lost their lives fighting in the Spanish Civil War has found a permanent home in Liverpool. The memorial, with the names of 27 local people, has been unveiled at the Unite building in Islington. The city's office block has...
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Alberto Bullrich, in the Comment Factory, writes that Spanish fascism is alive and well:
Falange Española de las J.O.N.S. ... is the euphemism used before, during and after the Spanish Civil war for the blueshirt Fascist party of Spain. It still exists as a group, organization or political ‘party’, whichever...
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James D. Fernández was interviewed on Spanish national radio about his exhibit on Spanish immigrants in New York, which has already attracted a lot of media attention. (October 13; listen here.) Sebastiaan Faber was interviewed on Radio Círculo Bellas Artes (Madrid) about Spanish historians' role in the debates about historical memory. (October 18;...
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After a six-month delay, the Spanish Supreme Court has finally removed Falange Española--Spain's fascist party--from the case in which Garzón is being charged with overstepping his judicial boundaries when he initiated an investigation of crimes against humanity committed during the Civil War and under the Franco regime. The fascists were one of the two...
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In an editorial today, El País calls attention to the "strange paralysis" that seems to have befallen the third of the cases brought against Judge Baltasar Garzón: a charge of illegal wiretapping in his investigation of corruption in the Valencian branch of the opposition party, the Partido Popular. El País questions...
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Ten years after founding the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), Emilio Silva estimates that there are still more than 1,800 mass graves to exhume in Spain, El País reports. The Spanish government will soon publish an online map detailing their exact locations. Since 2006, a year before the approval of...
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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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