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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Russia and Spain are making 2011 a year of mutual cultural-historical interest. Among other initiatives, ITAR-TASS reports, there will be a exhibit of masterpieces from the Prado at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and an show of the Russian collection of Spanish Civil War posters:
the Russians also want to...
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The University of Delaware reports the acquisition of the literary archive of American playwright Barrie Stavis (1906-2007):
Stavis knew at an early age that he would pursue a career as a writer. During the 1930s he struggled with his writing, but in 1937 sailed for Europe to volunteer his...
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The Spanish section of Amnesty International issued an annual report yesterday, at the presentation of which Claudio Cordone, interim director of AI Spain, called the trial against Garzón "scandalous." In the report, Amnesty criticizes the Spanish government for failing "to accept some of the recommendations made by States in the UN Working Group...
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Antonio Muñoz Molina, renowned Spanish novelist and public intellectual, as well as a member of ALBA's Board of Governors, has received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Brandeis University. His recent bestselling historical novel on the Spanish Civil War, La noche de los tiempos, is reviewed by Michael Kerrigan in this week's...
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The five-member United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, which was set up in 1980, issued statement expressing its concern over the recent suspension of judge Baltasar Garzón, warning against the introduction of amnesty laws, and stressing the victims's right to truth, and the need for investigation as a precondition for reconciliation. More...
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Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, has an an op-ed in El País today:
Our mission is to end impunity for crimes that, as we have said time and again, would not reoccur, only to see them committed time and...
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Due to appear soon: Fighters against Fascism, Max Arthur's oral history of British volunteers in Spanish Civil War. From the publisher:
Acclaimed oral historian Max Arthur has tracked down the eight survivors of this conflict, and interviewed them for their unique perspective, their memories of their time fighting and the motives...
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At the Globalist, César Chelala and Alejandro Garro write:
Judge Garzón properly applied international conventional and customary law. Two supranational tribunals (the European and Inter American Courts of Human Rights), as well as two UN committees (the UN Human Rights Committee and the UN Committee Against Torture) consistently condemned blanket amnesties,...
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Henry Chu reports from Madrid:
Gonzalo Martinez-Fresneda, an attorney for Garzon, said even the temporary suspension would have a "devastating symbolic effect." "If Garzon has to leave with all his boxes from his office, it's like the Lehman Bros. bankruptcy — there's no way back," Martinez-Fresneda said. "It would be a...
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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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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
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Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
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Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
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Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
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Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
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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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