The #YoSoy132 movement (coined by sensationalist pundits as "the Mexican Spring") was a crucial news story in the month of June. With Mexico's presidential election drawing near, the movement's criticism of Enrique Peña Nieto and unjust media coverage garnered much attention over the past month, attracting comparisons to both the Arab Spring and the...
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Come from Afar a novel by Gayla Reid, tells the story of a female Australian nurse who volunteers for the Spanish Relief Council during the Spanish Civil War.
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The poet Feerico Garcia Lorca is to be memorialized in an new opera by Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov premiering this month.
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The famous folk songs Red River Valley and Jarama Valley were recently featured in the HBO series Hemingway and Gellhorn, sung by Brooklyn (played by Eric Schneider). Brooklyn is, in a way, the spirit of Woody Guthrie: hopeful, innocent, idealistic like those young American men who went to Spain to fight fascism (among them...
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The Spanish football team "La Roja's" victory in the Euro 2012 represents more than just a few good players after a long history of the politicization of the sport in Spain.
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Théo Francos, who died a couple of days ago (obit in El País here), may have been a French communist, but he was also a war hero, fighting in the international brigades and risking his life in the Spanish Civil War. Six years after an article about Francos was published in El...
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Democracy Now! presents a full-hour tribute to Woody Guthrie who, along with Pete Seeger, was a good friend of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (listen to his version of Jarama Valley here):
Commemorations are being held across the country this year to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of...
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A plaque honouring the volunteers from the British Isles who fought in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 will be unveiled this Saturday (7 July) by one the last surviving British veterans of the war. David Lomon, 93, will unveil the new plaque in Jubilee Gardens in London’s South Bank (access from Belvedere Road,...
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With over 21.3 million registered voters, it is clear that the United States' Latino population will have a significant impact in the upcoming presidential elections this November. At the same time, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have faltered in their respective advertising campaigns when it comes to marketing themselves to Latino voters. While...
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Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) has won the Mexican presidential election, beating out Andres Lopez Manuel Obrador of the Leftist Party with a plurality of 38 percent of the vote. The election of Peña Nieto signifies Mexico's frustration with the weak agenda of current president Felipe Calderrón of the PAN...
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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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