We know, of course, that he gave his talent as a writer to support the Republican side.
But there are at least two additional things Hemingway did that have attracted little attention.
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Don Harris, founder of latienda.com, an on-line purveyor of fine Spanish foods, recently invited me to contribute a post to his blog. My short piece, on the foodways of Spanish immigrants in the US, is currently featured there:http://blog.tienda.com/ As I mention in the post, it was while conducting research about how Spanish immigrants in the...
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Mass demonstrations were held in Spain and other parts of Europe this week to protest against the austerity measures being imposed throughout the European Union. Depending on who you believe, the demonstration in Madrid on November 14 mobilized as many as one million people (according to its union organizers) or as few as 35,000 (according...
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The CBC program Living Out Loud celebrates Remembrance Day with a four-part documentary The Spanish Crucible. The first two parts were broadcast on November 9 and 11; the third and fourth will be aired on November 16 and 18. More details here; clips and an interactive timeline are here. Listen to the first...
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We just received the sad news that Harry Wayland Randall, one of the last surviving veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, passed away last night at a care facility in Snowflake, Arizona. Harry was a Sergeant in Mac-Paps battalion and Chief Photographer of the Photographic Unit of the 15th International Brigade. His unit’s work is...
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Severiano Montero of the Association of Friends of the International Brigades reports:
Dear friends:
We inform you that the week dedicated to the Defense of Madrid and the participation in it of the IB was successful.
On Tuesday 6th, at the...
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NPR's Karen Michel visited Pete Seeger, who has cut two new albums:
Tall and lean, in faded Levi's and corduroy shirt, Pete Seeger still pretty much looks like he did when the young Harvard dropout met the man who helped him find his life's work: Woody Guthrie. ... In a spoken-word track on...
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"Every Thursday evening, in the middle of the Puerta del Sol, a small crowd gathers around an equestrian statue of King Carlos III to stage a modest protest. There are rarely more than 25 people, most of them in their 70s. The first thing several of them do is unfurl a banner that reads:...
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A mural to Irish International Brigade veteran Bob Doyle was dedicated last weekend in northern Dublin.
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Severiano Montero from the Association of Friends of the International Brigades writes: This year’s homage to the International Brigades will be part of the commemoration of the 76th anniversary of the defense of Madrid. This is the program: November 7th. Meeting at the Ateneo de Madrid, at 19:30, to commemorate the De fence of...
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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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