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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Today the Spanish press covers another success of the ARMH , which to date has carried out 153 exhumations of mass graves and recovered the remains of 1,330 victims of Francoist violence. Spain is second only to Cambodia in terms of the numbers...
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Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of three articles about the work of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), a grassroots Spanish organization helping the victims of Francoism in their pursuit of truth, justice and reparations. Click here for the second and third. In early January, El...
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Alan Warren writes: The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic by Henry Buckley is about to be published this April 30th by Tauris Publishing. This extraordinary book is a very rare find, since virtually the entire print run prior to distribution was destroyed during the London Blitz in 1940 and only a few...
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In part with a 50,000 euro Basque Spanish Civil War remembrance project, the bodies of approximately 100 Basque fighters are set to be exhumed this February.
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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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