Nottinghamshire, UK. Fierce local debate over an information board honoring the 19 Nottinghamshire International Brigade volunteers has spurred growing resentment in recent years, especially after the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich last week.
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Sinn Féin activists and the families of six Dublin International Brigade volunteers gathered to unveil a plaque honoring to six local veterans of the Spanish Civil War May 4th on Emmet Road in Dublin’s Inchicore district. Over 150 attendees listened to speakers including the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland, local Sinn...
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Must history repeat itself? Foreign correspondent and Spanish Civil War historian Michael Petrou claims that Western democracies need to learn from their mistakes in 1936 Spain to prevent a similar fate in 2013 Syria.
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Los brigadistas chinos en la Guerra Civil: La llamada de España (1936-1939), by Hwei-Ru Tsou and Len Tsou, was published this month by Los Libros de la Catarata in Madrid, Spain. This new book is a Spanish edition of the original Chinese book, The Call of Spain: The Chinese Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) which was...
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Paco de Onís at Skylight Pictures writes:
This indelible image captures the moment at the Guatemalan trial of former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, when he and his mustachioed legal team are listening to Judge Jasmín Barrios as she pronounces him guilty of commiting genocide and crimes against humanity against the Maya Ixil people,...
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More on the Ríos Montt conviction in today’s broadcast of Democracy Now! http://m.democracynow.org/stories/13637
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The BBC reports from Guatemala City, where ALBA/Puffin Award winners Fredy Peccerelli and Kate Doyle have been testifying in the historical trial of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt:
Friends and Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade hosted a presentation on the Asian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War earlier this month in Tamiment Library at New York University. To a packed house house, Len Tsou described how he became interested in the topic after viewing the film The Good Fight, which features a...
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On the 82 anniversary of the founding of the Spanish Republic, Appellate Court Judge, E.J. Salcines, tells a wonderful story about the Republican flag at Tampa’s Centro Asturiano. 14 April 2013, Salcines Park, West Tampa https://vimeo.com/64033205
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The images from the Len Crome lecture and conference on George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia are now available on the IBMT’s Flickr site.
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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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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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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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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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