Jeff McAleer reviews "Popular Front," a new board game developed by Numbskull set during the Spanish Civil War:
Popular Front recreates this conflict in 90-minute strategy game form, leading players to compete against their ideological counterparts not only for military positioning, but for political victory. Players must be...
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Ángel Gurría Quintana reviews The Wrong Blood, Manuel de Lope's newly translated Spanish Civil War novel, for the Financial Times:
The Wrong Blood ... is set in the Basque country, near the French border, in what one character calls “the most eccentric corner of Spain”. ... The greatest...
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How to "create a new historiography of an event that has been saddled with oblivion, repression, ideological baggage, and, now, personal reminiscence"? Ruth MacKay writes in the latest issues of the History Workshop Journal on the Spanish Civil War as a challenge for historians, covering recent developments and polemics:
today something...
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Marjorie Baumgarten sees the award-winning new film at FantasticFest:
Amid an epic love story, the film also functions as a parable about the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, themes that are practically a subgenre of the Spanish cinema. Beginning in 1937, the film opens with a preamble...
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An article and television report by Stephanie Simon for New York 1 (2-min. video can be viewed here):
"We opened up the boxes, you know, didn't know what to expect. And in fact, there were about 165 rolls of nitrate film, which is highly flammable and combustible. But there...
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Iskra1916 reports on the commemoration of Socialist Spanish Civil War volunteers from Belfast:
the Republican Socialist ex-prisoners group, Teach Na Failte and the Lower Castlereagh Community Development Group, in conjunction with the Consensus Programme, met today for a tour of
"Activist judges like Garzón, Andreu, and Pedraz have created a big diplomatic headache for the Zapatero government." An overview of this past two years' developments at Project Censored: Media Democracy in Action:
In October 2009, under great pressure from the United States, the government of Spain decided to limit its own...
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A feature in Fabulous magazine on women war journalists, including Martha Gellhorn:
Described by her biographer as a woman who "smoked, drank and travelled with abandon" and used sex to get the best stories, American Martha Gellhorn had an epic career spanning 60 years. She wrote of the human suffering...
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Marlene Sidaway from the International Brigade Memorial Trust writes with sad news (listen to Sam here):
We are very sorry to have to tell you that our much loved and respected Chairman, SAM LESSER (RUSSELL), has died at the age of 95.
Sam was a founding-member...
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From our friend Manus O'Riordan: On 29 September 2010, TG4--the Irish language TV station--showed (with English language subtitles) a new documentary on the Irish Socialist Republican leader James Connolly, who was the inspiration for the 15th International Brigade’s Connolly Column. Manus is interviewed briefly in the 10th minute of Part 1. This documentary will remain accessible...
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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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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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We talk about the “return” of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain, even though that massive painting had never been here before its “repatriation” in 1981. The magnificent show “Ben Shahn: On Non-Conformity” curated by Laura Katzman and on display until February 26 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, elicits a similar sense:...
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Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
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Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
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When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
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Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
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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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