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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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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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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The time she spent in civil-war Spain loomed large in the life of Martha Gellhorn, the St. Louis-born war journalist. “The truth is that Martha could not stop thinking, feeling, and writing about her Spanish experiences.” “Objectivity bullshit.” That’s what Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) called the journalism of her day. Her letters to personalities like...
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Among the thousands of Jewish volunteers who joined the International Brigades were many descendants of the Sephardim. What was it like for them to “return” to Spain? Three case studies: Lini de Vries, César Covo, and Samuel Nahman, aka Manny Harriman.
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How the 22-year-old Jewish American dancer Janet Riesenfeld performed flamenco to help raise money for the Second Republic under fascist attack.
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Why did Jawaharlal Nehru, future prime minister of India, visit civil-war Spain in 1938? As it turned out, the triangular relationship between Britain, Spain, and India had deep cultural and geopolitical implications.
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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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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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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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