An informative piece from In These Times on the political dimensions of the rivalry between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid:
For more than 100 years, Barca has conducted itself as a “defender of freedom and democratic rights,” On April 11, Barca will face its fiercest rival, Real Madrid....
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An interesting essay on possible parallels between Republican Spain and Thailand today, in the Asia Times:
Some foreign observations, reporting and analyses suggest the conflicts in Thai politics that are now being voiced on the streets of Bangkok are of the kind that brought many foreigners to the war against...
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Speculation about Michael Mann's Robert Capa film from a Hollywood blog:
Has Eva Green joined Michael Mann's romance tale of renowned war photographerRobert Capa set during the Spanish Civil War? The actress' reported casting in the adaptation of Susana Fortes' "Waiting For Robert Capa" comes courtesy of a throwaway line
Vivir de pie: Las guerras de Cipriano Mera (Living on your Feet: The Struggles of Cipriano Mera) is part of the official selection at the Tallahassee Film Festival next week:
The film focuses on the odyssey of Cipriano Mera, a bricklayer who commanded the 4th army corps during the Spanish...
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Sunday, April 18, at 1:00 pm. Nathan Thornton, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War and lifelong activist, recollects the resistance against fascism and lessons for today. With documentary film footage and additional commentary by Corine Thornton. A spring lunch with vegetarian option for $8.00 served at 12:15 pm. New...
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War is Beautiful, the compelling Civil-War memoir by James Neugass, Edward Barsky's driver, is being published in Spain this month. A review in El País:
Un vibrante libro de memorias, que mereció los elogios de Antonio Muñoz Molina: "Nunca es condescendiente, nunca es narcisista y, a diferencia de otros testigos, no...
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A meta-site for archival collections in the United Kingdom. Go to the search page and type in Spanish Civil War.
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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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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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
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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