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 #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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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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The iconic group portrait of raggedy Lincoln Brigade volunteers that’s become ALBA’s calling card over the years is now finally available in an uncropped, high-res print. When and where was it taken? And who exactly are these 29 men?
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Tina Modotti and Vittorio Vidali, who dedicated a major part of their lives to the Communist International, have long been surrounded by myth. New research by the historian David Jorge suggests that they consistently strove for broad leftist fronts—even when the leadership of the Comintern favored other tactics.
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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
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Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
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Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
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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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