In an op-ed piece published today in El País, Professor Ángel Viñas vindicates the American historian Herbert Southworth and his seminal work on the bombardment of Guernica, while denouncing the continued attempts by right-wing historians to perpetuate some of the myths about the bombing spread by the Franco regime. Read the whole piece here;...
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The Barcelona Provincial Court has ordered the first judicial investigation into the aerial targeting of civilian populations during the Spanish Civil War.
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Laurie Levinger writes: It is a great pleasure and honor to have been invited by AABI to give a reading from my book about my uncle Sam Levinger, Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War (click here for the review in the Volunteer). Justin Byrne, Agustin Lozano (translator) and myself will...
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No one would have thought it possible. Prosecution in an international court would have been stunning enough. But now the amazing has happened: President Reagan's buddy, Guatemala's dictator in the early 80s, General Efrain Ríos Montt is on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity in Guatemala itself! He is...
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Jonah Rubin is a young scholar working on his PhD thesis in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. If all goes well, in a couple of years, his work, tentatively titled “‘All of Spain is One Big Mass Grave’: Death, Memory, and Democracy Seventy-Five Years After the Spanish Civil War” will take its place...
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The second issue of Spain's new cooperative, employee-owned magazine La Marea includes a short piece by me, "Legitimate Anger," reflecting on the powerful interview with Lincoln vet Abe Osheroff, produced some years ago by Jim Fernández and Katie Halper for the exhibit Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil...
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Every crisis is an opportunity. “The debt crisis and years of recession have hit Spanish media hard: some 70 news outlets have closed in the last four years and a reported 9,000 journalists are currently without work,” Michael Levitin writes for Truthout and Occupy.com in a piece about the new, employee-owned, cooperative Spanish magazine...
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When at the NH state house, testifying on a bill to repeal our Stand Your Ground law, I decided to check on our old friend described in my last blog: the plaque. Since the 2001 adventure, that chunk of bronze has been sitting in a vault just off from the room where the Senate...
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The other day I was at the archives reading a letter from Veteran Sidney Rosenblatt to Estelle Katz. Sydney was writing about how the letters he received from home gave him the strength to carry on. His writing was beautiful and his story came alive as I held his letter in my...
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Dr. Josep Maria Massons Esplugas, former head of the surgical team for the International Brigades, passed away in Barcelona on November 10, 2012. Born in Valls (Tarragona, Catalonia) on January 18, 1913, he received his medical degree from the University of Barcelona in 1934 and went on to earn a surgical position at the...
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New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.
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On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
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In 1944, Barsky wrote A Surgeon Goes to War, an 18-chapter memoir of his time in Spain, which was never published but can be consulted at NYU’s Tamiment Library. This is the first chapter.
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Self-effacing and shy though he was, Dr. Edward Barsky’s experience in Spain made him an outspoken activist, tireless organizer, innovative frontline surgeon, and political prisoner. “Eddie is a saint,” Hemingway wrote. “That’s where we put our saints in this country—in jail.”
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The Volunteer is thrilled to honor Dr. Barsky on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
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For Edward Barsky, political and humanitarian activism were two sides of the same coin. Those who persecuted him begged to differ.
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The time she spent in civil-war Spain loomed large in the life of Martha Gellhorn, the St. Louis-born war journalist. “The truth is that Martha could not stop thinking, feeling, and writing about her Spanish experiences.” “Objectivity bullshit.” That’s what Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) called the journalism of her day. Her letters to personalities like...
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Among the thousands of Jewish volunteers who joined the International Brigades were many descendants of the Sephardim. What was it like for them to “return” to Spain? Three case studies: Lini de Vries, César Covo, and Samuel Nahman, aka Manny Harriman.
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How the 22-year-old Jewish American dancer Janet Riesenfeld performed flamenco to help raise money for the Second Republic under fascist attack.
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Why did Jawaharlal Nehru, future prime minister of India, visit civil-war Spain in 1938? As it turned out, the triangular relationship between Britain, Spain, and India had deep cultural and geopolitical implications.
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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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