Today's El País features an article on With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the short silent documentary by Henri Cartier-Bresson that was recently found by Juan Salas in the ALBA collection at New York University's Tamiment Library, restored by Alice Moscoso and her team at the Barbara Goldsmith Preservation and Conservation...
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After an intense, two-hour meeting this morning, Spain's Consejo Superior del Poder Judicial (CSPJ) has announced that investigative magistrate Baltasar Garzón has been suspended for the duration of the trial against him, which was formally opened two days ago. Meanwhile, his request to be granted a leave of absence in order to take...
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El País has published a short declaration of support for Garzón signed by, among others, Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Fuentes, and Alain Touraine, in which the signatories express their "astonishment" at the trial of the investigative magistrate. "The fact that this suit is brought by a fascist party, and incomprehensibly accepted by the Spanish...
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The Consejo General del Poder Judicial has called an emergency meeting this Friday --El País reports-- to decide whether to suspend Baltasar Garzón, a trial against whom was opened this morning by Supreme Court Justice Luciano Varela. A suspension for the duration of the trial would jeopardize his possible 7-month transfer to...
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Scott Horton reports in Harper's on some further bold judicial action from the National Spanish Criminal Court, on which Baltasar Garzón also sits:
Prosecutors attached to the Audiencia Nacional in Madrid are reportedly requesting that Judge Ismael Moreno issue an order for the arrest of thirteen CIA agents involved in...
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The Morning Star reviews the International Brigades exhibit currently on display at London's Star Gallery:
This outstanding exhibition, largely drawn from the International Brigade Memorial Trust archive at the Marx Memorial Library, tells in words and pictures the inspirational story of the 2,500 British and Irish volunteers who...
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This Friday May 21, Turner Classic Movies will screen one of the most interesting, albeit less well known, Hollywood productions about the Spanish Civil War, as a tribute to Lena Horne, who died this week at the age of 92. The Fallen Sparrow (Richard Wallace, 1943) stars John Garfield and Maureen O'Hara...
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In a remarkably swift reaction to yesterday's news that Investigate Magistrate Baltasar Garzón has requested permission for a seven-month stint as special advisor to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, this morning Justice Luciano Varela of the Spanish Supreme Court has opened the trial against Garzón for...
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Jane Stillwater at Berkeleyside on Mother's Day the Berkeley way:
“My mom is so Berkeley that she used to take us to reunions of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.”
More here.
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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