A video of a talk by biographer Irme Schaber on Gerda Taro, the Spanish Civil War photographer who worked with Robert Capa and died in Spain, and whose images will be part of the "Mexican Suitcase" exhibit at the ICP this fall.
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Forced as a child to live with her aunt, Conxa toils the harsh farmland of the Pyrenees, finding love in the form of local builder, Jaume, until his involvement with the Communist revolutionaries threatens her hard-won security.
As lapidary as its title suggests, this is a book of muted emotions. Conxa’s world is one in...
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The website of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives has just had a facelift. Check out the new look and improved navigation, including the ALBA Digital Library...
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The Socialist History News reports the death of British scholar Jim Fyrth, who wrote extensively about the history of the Popular Front and the British Left, including its involvement in the Spanish Civil War (see for example this article on the Aid Spain movement).
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The Spanish Ministry of Culture has launched a web portal on victims of the Spanish Civil War. In compliance with the so-called Law of Historical Memory, adopted in December 2007, this portal seeks to provide the public with an easy way to access to any information available in public archives about those who...
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The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company's version of Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Ryan Whinnem and performed June 11–July 11 among the ruins of the Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park in Maryland, is set during the Spanish Civil War.
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ALBA's sister organization in the UK, the International Brigade Memorial Trust, has just published its second newsletter of the year, featuring reviews of Angela Jackson's new book and the catalog of the Antifascistas exhibit; news on Garzón and newly unveiled monuments; and a report of a visit by SCW vets to the House of...
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Michael Kerrigan reviews ALBA Board member Antonio Muñoz Molina's ambitious Civil War novel, La noche de los tiempos, for the Times Literary Supplement (pdf):
Written with lyric intensity and epic scope, La noche de los tiempos engages as only a novel can with the everyday stuff...
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David McKelvy White was a founding member and Executive Secretary of the VALB, serving in that capacity at the time of his death in July of 1945. Dave, as he was known to friends, was the eldest son of George White and Charlotte McKelvy White, and spent his childhood in Marietta, Ohio. After amassing...
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Guénaël Mettraux writes an incisive op-ed for the International Herald Tribune :
The reaction to Garzón’s latest investigative efforts and the Brazilian Supreme Court’s recent upholding of a law of amnesty that applies to the crimes of Brazil’s military dictatorship are powerful reminders that states can still decide what to do with...
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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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