Today, the day Spain commemorates its conquest of Latin America (Día de la Hispanidad), known as Columbus Day in the U.S., the Spanish Minister of Justice spoke on Spanish national public television to defend the research going on at the Valley of the Fallen, and denied that any mass graves are being...
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The renowned, boundary-pushing Brossa String Quartet (Brossa Quartet de Corda) has just released a new CD with songs from the International Brigades, including "Si me quieres escribir," "Los cuatro generales," "Viva la Quince Brigada," and "Tango del Camp d'Argelers." The album can be bought here. See here for a video of...
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Next week the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, ARMH), founded and led by Emilio Silva, will be celebrating the tenth anniversary of its first exhumation of a mass grave, which took place on October 23-24, 2000 in Priaranza del Bierzo (León), Público
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 Spanish media. More video interviews here.
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The Spanish Civil War Memory Project of the University of California at San Diego--whose library hosts one of the world's largest collections on the subject--has posted a first video with an introduction and victims' testimonies (in Spanish).
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Photographer Peter Marshall pays tribute to the recently deceased SCW vet.
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EITB reports:
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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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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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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On May 3, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice Community received the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism at a ceremony in New York City. Executive Director Audrey Sasson delivered the following acceptance speech.
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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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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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