Supporters of the legendary International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War will gather in Jubilee Gardens in London’s South Bank from 12.30pm on Saturday 6 July. Next to the park’s International Brigade memorial they will commemorate the 2,500 volunteers from the British Isles who defended the Spanish Republic against Franco, Hitler and Mussolini between...
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Chela Scott Weber, associate head of the Tamiment Library, which houses the ALBA collection, writes in the NYU Libraries newsletter on a new donation, The Joseph North and Helen Oken North Papers: The North Papers span the 1910s through the 1960s, most of them from 1930 to 1960. Joseph North was a journalist who covered...
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Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! gets the latest news on Edward Snowden from Michael Ratner, an attorney to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, member of ALBA's Honorary Board, and president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional RightsRead more »
Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) was an American poet who happened to be in Spain in July 1936, covered the Civil War as a journalist, and would revisit it time and again in her later work. Her previously unpublished Spanish Civil War novel Savage Coast has just been released, edited by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein (see here for a sneak peek...
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Our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust have announced their annual commemoration in London (poster here)
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Ralph Fasanella’s first gallery retrospective celebrates New York City’s bridges, skylines, and tenements; your neighbors, my neighbors, our memories and our aspirations. These pictures draw you in to conversations. You cannot help but stop to comment on them to your friends, the stranger next to you at the gallery, who will soon bond with...
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At his Jaily News blog, Nacho García reports on the attempt to remove the monument to the International Brigades in Madrid, the monument to the Lincoln Brigades in New Hampshire which is now threatened with being auctioned, and the status of the monument to the Brigades in Burgos. The Jaily News is inspired by and named...
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The Spanish authorities are not investigating crimes under international law committed during the Civil War and Franco period, sending the message that impunity for human rights abuses is allowed, Amnesty International said in a new report that was released yesterday. The report, titled Time Passes, Impunity Remains, examines how the Spanish authorities have refused to investigate...
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Around 200 people gathered on Saturday at the monument to the International Brigades on the campus of the Complutense University to protest the removal of the monument ordered by Madrid’s highest court. Among the speakers was University President José Carrillo, who said his office still has not received the court’s decision, and who vowed...
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As veterans, family, and friends of the International Brigades protest the Supreme Court of Madrid's decision to remove the IB Memorial at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), The Guardian's David Mathieson reports on the dangers of rewriting history.
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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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