This week's New Yorker's Goings On section includes the announcement of the Puffin-hosted benefit performance this coming Saturday October 16 by Pete Seeger, Patti Smith, and Guy Davis at the Museum of the City of New York. Order tickets here. Download the press release with all the details here.
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More than 112,000 descendants of Spanish Civil War exiles have requested and received Spanish citizenship, Europa Press reports, taking advantage of a provision to that effect included in the Law of Historical Memory that was adopted in December 2007.
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Professor Rafael Escudero has criticized the Spanish Attorney General (fiscal), Público reports, for misinterpreting the legal consequences of the Law of Historical Memory, which was adopted in December 2007, and which declares Francoist sentences "illegitimate," without going so far as to annul them altogether. As families of several prominent victims of Francoism--notably the poet...
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An oral history account of Åge Kjelsø, who served in the Thälmann Battalion and was arrested after the May 1937 events, published in Danish in the mid-1970s and recently translated:
From Albacete I went to the Andalucian front in southern Spain, and in the war of manoeuvre there we came...
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NYU student Melissa Howley blogs about her adventures in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade archival collection:
I looked through the Milton Wolff collection on this trip to the Tamiment Library. Immediately upon opening the box and scanning the folders I was drawn to the Hemingway Correspondence.
More here.
Acclaimed director Ken Loach, whose Land and Freedom (1995) loosely follows George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, will be awarded a Goyesca award for his Spanish Civil War film at a new Spanish festival for political cinema that will take place in November in Ronda, The Olive Press reports. See Loach's film in...
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The Spanish Civil War photography exhibit with rediscovered images from Capa, Taro, and Chim, continues to attract media attention worldwide. In addition to Public Radio International, see the Financial Times, BW Gallerist, Huffiington Post, and Mexico City's El Universal.
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Daniel Coysh, in the Morning Star, reviews Hugo García's new book on Republican and Nationalist attempts to shape public opinion in the UK:
The Spanish civil war remains a subject both endlessly fascinating and divisive for the left in Britain thanks to its status as the first war against...
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Yesterday the Telediario of Spanish national television covered La Colonia: Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898-1945, a photography exhibit curated by ALBA Board member James D. Fernández, and co-sponsored by ALBA. The segment can be viewed here (beginning at the 01:01:18 mark.) The show has already received a good amount of coverage in the...
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Utopia Productions based in Guillena, Andalucía has produced a CD of a live concert performed by the 24-year old Andalusian singer-songwriter, Lucía Sócam. She lends her voice to those who were forced to remain silent for so many years. All 18 songs are based on testimony by different people who tried to save 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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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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