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 Spanish press reports that Baltasar Garzón, under siege in Spain with three cases pending against him, has accepted an invitation from Luis Moreno Ocampo, the Argentinean chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, to begin working as advisor to the Prosecutor's Office there. Although Garzón has already made his...
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To be published this summer by the SEARCH Foundation: George Venturini's The Last Great Cause: Volunteers from Australia and Emilia-Romagna in Defence of the Spanish Republic, 1936-1939. Nine chapters, two appendices, containing names of 65 volunteers from Australia and 431 from Emilia-Romagna.
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The University of Valencia has just published the Spanish translation of Angela Jackson's classic British Women in the Spanish Civil War.
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Carol Strickland for the Christian Science Monitor:
"The reach of his curiosity," Galassi says, "is breathtaking." Not content to make pretty pictures, his goal was to discover the world and, in so doing, expand his – and our – vision.
More here.The Supreme court has rejected Garzón's request that Justice Varela recuse himself in the case related to Garzón's attempt to open an investigation of crimes against humanity during the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, and does not agree with Garzón that Varela's request of the plaintiffs to "revise and resubmit" their...
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The 74th Reunion of the Volunteers for Liberty: Brigadistas and Activists: A Legacy Without Borders. With Amy Goodman, recipient of the first annual ALBA Activist Award. Sunday, May 2nd, 2010, Museo del Barrio, New York City. Here is a slideshow:
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We are sad to report that long-time ALBA friend and supporter Carmen de Zulueta Cebrián, daughter of the Spanish Republican diplomat Luis de Zulueta, passed away this Saturday. Obituaries here and 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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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.
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On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
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In 1944, Barsky wrote A Surgeon Goes to War, an 18-chapter memoir of his time in Spain, which was never published but can be consulted at NYU’s Tamiment Library. This is the first chapter.
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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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