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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It wasn’t until I began scanning the old crumbling panoramic photograph that I started to become suspicious. The image is spectacular: a large crowd of Spanish immigrants poses for a picture at some kind of picnic. The owner of the photo and several of the Spaniards I’ve been interviewing in Monterey told me that...
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This coming July 7, at 12:30pm, the International Brigade Memorial in London's Jubilee Gardens will serve as the gathering point for a commemorative event featuring speakers, poetry, and music. More information on the flier (pdf).
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I’m back in Monterey, California, following up on the story of the Spanish immigrants who settled in this area in the early decades of the 20th century. I’m constantly surprised both by the ubiquity of photographs, stories, and objects related to the Republic and the Spanish Civil War, and by the relative oblivion into...
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This past Tuesday, Jorge Rafael Videla, the ex Argentine dictator who ruled from 1976 to 1983, gave his final words in his court case regarding the theft of babies from pregnant women during the country's Dirty War. According to elpais.com, the 86 year-old Videla used this platform as a means for insulting the...
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This coming fall, many renowned Spanish liberals and intellectuals will be promoting and celebrating a so-called Conference of Writers, Intellectuals, and Artists for the Compromise. The conference is set to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the "legendary Second International Writers' Conference for the Defense of Culture, which in the summer of 1937 met...
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With Mexico’s presidential election less than a week away, none of the candidates have firmly established their policies regarding Mexico’s Drug War, and have avoided divulging how they plan to combat the narco traffickers and cartels that have turned large areas of the country into violent warzones. The escalation of drug-related violence in the...
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The United States' federal judiciary is turning its back on constitutionality. With the emergence of several legal cases involving the complicity of the United States in tortures and disappearances that have occurred over the past decade, it is becoming increasingly evident that our justice system is corrupt. According to writer Scott Horton 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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