A new plaque has been added to the Jubilee Gardens' International Brigade memorial statue by British International Brigade veteran David Lomon.
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Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
A new plaque has been added to the Jubilee Gardens' International Brigade memorial statue by British International Brigade veteran David Lomon.
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Now online as part of the IBMT’s YouTube channel: a video report of the July 7 ceremony in Jubilee Gardens, London, to commemorate the 2,500 members of the International Brigades from Britain and Ireland. The footage includes images of Spanish Civil War veteran David Lomon, 93, unveiling a new plaque to honor the volunteers....
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Amy Goodman at Democracy Now!, on the lessons of the bombing:
Seventy-five years ago, the Spanish town of Guernica was bombed into rubble. The brutal act propelled one of the world’s greatest artists into a three-week painting frenzy. Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” starkly depicts the horrors of war, etched into the faces of...
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The photo show that I curated –La colonia: A photo album of Spanish immigrants in New York, 1898 – 1945– is currently on display in León, Spain, thanks to the city of León and the University of Washington, Seattle, which has a program and a site there. The show originally opened in New York,...
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The Associated Press reports: Chile’s president signed an anti-discrimination law on Thursday several months after the killing of a gay man beaten by attackers who carved swastikas into his body. The law was approved in May after being stuck in Congress for seven years. President Sebastián Piñera had urged lawmakers to speed its approval...
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In a recent exchange with a commenter on this blog, I mentioned how sometimes, when posting here, I feel like a hopeful child throwing a message in a bottle into the vast cybersea. And occasionally I experience the thrill of confirming that the message has arrived to an intended (if unknown) recipient. Those moments...
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The #YoSoy132 movement is broadening its scope beyond Mexico. On June 30th, many Mexican-Americans living in New York held a "symbolic vote" for Mexico's president in the city's Union Square. As the North American Congress on Latin America reports, the movement is focused on "the democratization of the country’s political system and the...
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The IBMT now has its own news area on YouTube. Our first video is an 18-minute film by Marshall Mateer on the June 2012 crossing of the Pyrenees by a group of enthusiasts from several countries to commemorate the international volunteers who joined the fight against fascism in Spain 75 years ago. View...
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A new exhibit in the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv focuses on the varied reactions of Jews in Palestine to the Spanish Civil War.
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Many readers young and old are familiar with Ernest Hemingway's classic novel, A Farewell to Arms. Few, however, may be completely aware of the painstaking revision Hemingway underwent in writing the ending to his famed novel, reworking its final lines at least 37 times before deciding on the final version. Now, 83 years the...
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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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