I have just heard the heartbreaking news of the death of Michael Nash, Director of the Tamiment Library and the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU. Over the years I had the good fortune of being able to work with Mike on a number of ALBA-related projects and on several occasions we co-taught...
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The brainchild of Englishman Rod Younger, Book4Spain offers Iberophiles one of the widest selections of books about Spain in the world.
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Patrick O'Connell not only led FC Barcelona to multiple victories, but allowed for half of the team to escape the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.
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The Canadian government recently opened a $2.5 million visitor's center in the house where Dr. Norman Bethune, the man who pioneered new medical techniques during the Spanish Civil War, was born.
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Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran Harry Fisher's friend and translator Ulrich Kolbe was recently interviewed by In Defense of Marxism journalist Karl Belin about the affects of the Spanish Civil War on Fisher's life.
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Judge Baltasar Garzón, winner of the 2011 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, will be joining the defense team of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks who, faced with extradition to Sweden, has sought refuge in the London embassy of Ecuador. Garzón will be working alongside Michael Ratner, of the Center for Constitutional...
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English tour-guide Nick Lloyd teaches tourists and Spaniards Spanish Civil War history, filling important gap in Barcelona's Spanish Civil War education.
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A new play by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Nino Cruz pays tribute to Federico García Lorca, killed by fascist forces in the opening days of the Spanish Civil War.
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An Enigma machine used by Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War has been given to the British Bletchley Park Trust.
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Though the Spanish Civil War left many physical and mental scars on Guernica, some citizens attempt to move forward through art.
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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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