Our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust have made a slideshow with images of their annual commemoration at the IB monument in Jubilee Gardens, London, last weekend. Click on any image to begin: http://bit.ly/1qJqEMW. Photos by Andrew Wiard.
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The Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI) has produced an interactive map of the tribute memorials to the International Brigades across Spain. The project in an ongoing labor, and anyone with information on a monument not currently included on the map, is welcome to contribute information and photos through AABI’s website. The map is...
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Seeger Fest, a free five-day celebration of the music and life of Pete and Toshi Seeger will take place July 17 -21 in New York City and the Hudson Valley. Organized by the Seegers’ grandson, Kitama Cahill-Jackson, the festivities will include: concerts, film screenings, boat rides, and a photo exhibit. The strong support and...
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Documentary filmmaker Pamela Yates writes on Facebook: Joyce Horman never gave up on the quest for justice. Seeking justice is justice, and finally the U.S. role in ordering the murder of two US citizens in 1973, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, is verified by the Chilean courts. The perps are mostly dead – but this...
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“The United States military intelligence services played a pivotal role in setting up the murders of two American citizens in 1973, providing the Chilean military with the information that led to their deaths, a court here has ruled,” Pascale Bonnefoy writes in the New York Times today: The recent court decision found that an American naval...
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From our friends at the IBMT: One of Spain’s leading campaigners for justice for the tens of thousands of victims of Franco’s dictatorship will address the annual commemoration this Saturday (5 July 2014) for the British volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War as part of the legendary International Brigades. Emilio Silva will...
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Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory since 1936. By Jeremy Treglown. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.)
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Our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust are getting ready for their annual gathering at the IB monument in Jubilee Gardens, London: Saturday July 5,2014 IB Memorial, Jubilee Gardens, South Bank, London SE1 Assemble 12:30, program runs to 2pm Music from Maddy Carty and Na-mara Speakers include Emilio Silva of Spain’s Association for...
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The actress and activist Ruby Dee, a long-time friend of the veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, passed away this week at age 91. From her obituary in the New York Times: Ms. Dee went from being a disciple of Paul Robeson to starring with Mr. Poitier on Broadway. She was a featured player in the...
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Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has been elected a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his accomplishments with the EJI, NYU reports: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected 204 new members this year, including Nobel Prize winner in chemistry Dan Shechtman; Pulitzer Prize...
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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.
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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