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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An excellent post at the NYRblog by human-rights leader Aryeh Neier about the unprecedented prosecution of Guatemala’s former head of state: …the prosecution of General Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala, now eighty-six years old, stands out in at least one respect. For the first time, a former head of state is being tried for...
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On Sunday, participants in Argentina’s National Day of Memory march stretched the whole length of the Avenida de Mayo—from the Congressional Plaza to the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the presidential palace. That’s a distance of almost two kilometers. They came together to commemorate March 24, 1976, when the military overthrew a democratically-elected...
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Executive Producers Jeanne Houck (ALBA Board Member) & Michele Fillion (EP and director) announce the TV broadcast premiere of “No Job for A Woman”: The Women Who Fought to Report WWII on PBS World Channel starting March 20th. Before World War II, war reporting was considered NO JOB FOR A WOMAN. But when American...
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Here is the invitation for ALBA's annual event in New York City (download as pdf; order tickets online):
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"Republican opposition to legalizing the status of millions of illegal immigrants is crumbling" among leading Republicans, Ashley Parker and Michael Shear write in the NY Times: "leading lawmakers in the party scramble to halt eroding support among Hispanic voters — a shift that is providing strong momentum for an...
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Clancy Sigal writes to the London Review of Books in response to Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s review of Richard Baxell's Unlikely Warriors:
The drift of Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s piece about the Spanish Civil War is that it was ‘one wake-up call after another’, in which the untrained, poorly armed volunteers had their optimism shattered by...
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Our friends at SkyLight Pictures are writing with exciting news: The long awaited trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt begins today, March 19, 2012. The brutal Guatemalan dictator will be the first head of state to be tried for genocide in genuine proceedings in his own country’s justice system. Ríos Montt and another ex-General, José Mauricio Rodríguez...
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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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