José-Luis Peñafuerte (Belgium, Spain: 2009). Screened this week at the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. Trailer here:
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Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
José-Luis Peñafuerte (Belgium, Spain: 2009). Screened this week at the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. Trailer here:
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Stuart Christie's site is a treasure trove of Spanish Civil War- and Anarchism-related films.
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Are ALBA's institutes for high-school teachers proof of the "corruption of the academy"? Or are some people's reactions and suspicions proof of a particular pathology afflicting students of American Communism and Anti-Communism? An interesting discussion on an historians' listerv.
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Nick Ravich at Art21: "The biggest treat of the evening was the world premiere of the recently rediscovered 20-minute, silent 35mm film With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (1937-38)."
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Amanda Hopkinson in The Independent: "Essentially, this is the account of one day in the first year of the war, 19th August 1936, when pyres of books were assembled and abused by posses of Falangists on the beaches of Galicia, and its aftermath."
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Graham Keeley in the London Times: "Today, for the first time, relatives of those held in the camps will discover how an army of faceless civil servants made sure that the books were balanced — evoking comparisons with the efficiency of their Nazi counterparts — when hundreds of files go on display at...
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Last month, the Los Angeles Times came in defense of Baltasar Garzón, the investigative magistrate from Spain who is threatened with suspension because of his attempt to investigate crimes against humanity committed under Francoism.
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El País highlights ALBA's investigative work on a gift for President Obama. Click here for an English translation.
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Last August, Matti Mattson became the third surviving Lincoln vet to acquire Spanish citizenship. (Video)
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The history of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade has all but been forgotten in American high schools, with history textbooks barely making mention of these “premature anti-fascists.” But over the last two years, 33 students from the Bergen County Academies, a magnet high school in Hackensack, New Jersey, have opted to learn more about the...
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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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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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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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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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