From JWeekly:
Renée Duering (who lives in Daly City) and Margot Slodzina (a longtime resident of Caracas, Venezuela) originally met one another in 1933 in Cologne, Germany, as young members of the Jewish girl scouts.
Margot finished high school at the German school in Madrid....
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Via the Bristol Radical History Group:
The memorial to the four Bristol volunteers who joined the International Brigades to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War in Castle Park is to be surrounded by a vivid mosiac border in Republican colours and will be unveiled at 12 noon on 14th...
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News from Rhode Island:
In July 1937, John G. Hovan boarded a France-bound boat to fight the rising Fascist powers. He headed to Spain, south across the Pyrenees, where thousands of other volunteers were already fighting a civil war that proved to be a prelude to World War II. The war was...
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A government-led investigation has revealed that the Valley of the Fallen--Franco's massive Civil War monument completed in 1959 after twenty years of construction by forced-labor crews consisting of Republican prisoners--doesn't merely hold Franco's own body, but the bodies of 33,832 others, making it the Spain's largest mass grave. More here.
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After Human Rights Watch and the Robert F. Kennedy Center, Amnesty International, the International Federation for Human Rights, and the World Organization Against Torture join scores of other human-rights organizations in expressing their solidarity with the embattled magistrate, and their bafflement at his possible suspension for investigating crimes against humanity committed...
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From InsideToronto:
In 1936, Norman Bethune headed to Spain to provide medical care on the battlefield and this is where he developed the world's first mobile medical unit to administer blood transfusions on the spot, which saved many lives. He's revered in China and remembered in Montreal, but more than...
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From CNN:
Historians and teachers have reason to be deeply concerned over the latest actions taken by the Texas Board of Education regarding social studies curriculum standards.
Many conservatives are simply unwilling to accept how much the writing and teaching of American history has changed...
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Monday, March 29, 7:00 p.m. Queridísmos verdugos (Basilio Martín Patino, 1977, 100 mins). Programmed by Helen Graham, King Juan Carlos Chair in Spanish Culture and Civilization/Professor of Modern Spanish History, Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London. Introduced by Sarah Thomas, PhD candidate, NYU Department of Spanish and Portuguese. In Spanish...
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Today in the Times:
Spain’s Supreme Court announced Thursday that an investigating magistrate could proceed with a case against a crusading judge known internationally for indicting Osama bin Laden and the Chilean dictator Read more »
About to be released in the US: the Henri Cartier-Bresson Collector's Edition, featuring two of his Spanish Civil War films, Victory of Life (1937) and Spain Will Live (1938).
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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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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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