The History News Network reports on the "Picasso: Peace and Freedom" exhibit at the Tate in Liverpool. The show's pièce de resistance is the painting The Charnel House, on display in the UK for the first time in fifty years:
The Charnel House was based on a short...
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"There is international support for the view that a national prosecutor or investigating judge is entitled to seek to go behind a national amnesty in respect of international crimes in his or her own country," nine prominent international law scholars write in a letter published today in The Guardian:
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The trial of Baltasar Garzón has revealed that the Spanish courts have become politicized to a worrisome extent, Sinikka Tarvainen writes in the Earth Times:
For more than a decade, judges have increasingly come under the influence of politicians, many Spanish analysts say, concerned that such a situation is undermining...
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Erna Paris reflects in The Globe and Mail on President Obama's recent renunciation of the Bush national security doctrine and notes an increasing impact of the work done by the International Criminal Court, among other places in Spain:
Although the ICC is still a toddler in institutional terms,...
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The Spanish newspaper Público is publishing a series of stories of victims of Francoist repression--stories that, it says, the Spanish courts are refusing to hear. In November 2008, a month after his controversial October 2008 brief indicting the Franco regime for crimes against humanity, judge Baltasar Garzón disqualified himself from the case (se inhibió), passing...
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Picasso was no friend of Franco--or was he? "Although his political sympathies are known to have lain with the hard left, it turns out he was not above breaking bread with Franco's regime.", Vanessa Thorpe reports in today's Guardian on new information discovered by Picasso experts John Richardson and Gijs van Hensbergen:
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Yesterday the French Minister of Culture , Frederic Mitterrand, revealed a statue in honor of the Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, whose The Spanish Earth (1937) is one of the best known documentaries of the Spanish Civil War. The sculpture, 36 feet high, is the work of Irish artist Bryan McCormack. The Joris Ivens Foundation reports:
Carl Geiser, a key political leader in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and author of a pioneering book,Prisoners of the Good Fight, died November 28 in Corvallis, Oregon. View images of the memorial service here.
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An interview with Professor Francie Cate-Arries of the College of William and Mary about her recent work with students in Madrid exploring the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War.
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This Wednesday evening, the Filmoteca Española in Madrid screened Henri Cartier-Bresson's recently recovered Spanish Civil War documentary With the Lincoln Brigade, presented by Juan Salas, who discovered the film. Also present was ALBA board member Soledad Fox. See here for a report in Público, here for more on the discovery, here...
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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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