Earlier this year, a group of musicians from the Conservatory of Navarra and CTL School of Image and Sound set out to make a unique piece of music. At 24 minutes long, the piece (written for voice, alto saxophone, and percussion) is a sprawling exploration of, as the group puts it, "composition, performance /...
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"A judge ordered the arrest on Tuesday of eight retired police and military officers in connection with the kidnapping and disappearance of Boris Weisfeiler, an American university professor who disappeared while hiking in Chile in 1985," Pascale Bonnefoy reports in the New York Times,
Mr. Weisfeiler, then 43, was the only United...
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In a glowing review in the New York Times, writer Dwight Garner praises the newly published 'Diaries,' by George Orwell for exposing a more personal side of the legendary essayist, novelist, and social commentator. As Garner writes:
Among the vivifying things about his “Diaries,” issued now in one volume for the first time,...
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Yesterday director Macarena Aguiló's documentary, entitled "The Chilean Building," premiered in New York City. The documentary focuses on an educational program called Project Home, which was created in the 1970s by members Chile's Revolutionary Left Movement and others who opposed the Pinochet regime. According to the New York Times, "these boys and girls...
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Alan Warren writes: An event at Quinto will be held over the weekend of August 31/ September 1, 2012 to commemorate the 75th anniversaries of the Battles of Quinto and Belchite. We look forward to meeting those keen to explore Purburrel Hill and the various locations of the Battle of Quinto aswell as the locations of...
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In a powerful op-ed in the New York Times today, filmmakers Michael Moore and Oliver Stone defend Julian Assange and warn against the consequences of a US attempt to prosecute the founder of Wikileaks:
If Mr. Assange is extradited to the United States, the consequences will reverberate for years around the world....
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Arizona Governor Jan Brewer staunchly defended her position as a stalwart of racism and bigotry in the United States' government this past week, signing into effect an "executive order instructing state officials to deny driver’s licenses and other benefits to young undocumented immigrants who are granted temporary legal status under a new federal program...
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The controversy regarding Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa's decision to grant asylum to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange this morning is growing at a rapid pace. According to The Guardian, Assange "took refuge in the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of sexual misconduct." Ecuadorian officials are...
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Yesterday young undocumented immigrants lined up across the country to wait for the opportunity to defer deportation. This event marks the official initiation of President Barack Obama's plan to allow some young undocumented immigrants to apply for reprieve, and could affect as many as 1.7 million people, reports the New York Times....
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In Colombia, former workers for GM with various work-related injuries and disabilities have gone on a hunger strike, literally sewing their lips shut until their demands for the company are met. The strike has seen growth and received significant media coverage over recent days, beginning with four strikers on August 1st, and expanding to...
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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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