Ralph S. Abascal (1934-1997), attorney and defender of farmworkers’ rights, argued the case that resulted in the ban on the use of DDT and other deadly pesticides in California’s fields and orchards. His father, who had wound up in California after emigrating from Cantabria, Spain, lost three brothers to the Republican cause in the...
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Our friends in the UK at the International Brigade Memorial Trust have just sent us their latest newsletter: 28 pages with articles Lou Kenton and David Lomon, a new permanent IB display in Liverpool, anti-Francoist guerrillas in Andalusia, IBer AC Williams, and much more. Read it in pdf here.
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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 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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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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From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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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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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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