While Spain continues to struggle economically, the country has one constant with which its citizens can be proud to identify: soccer. This was not always the case, however. In his new book, entitled La Roja: How Soccer Conquered Spain and How Spanish Soccer Conquered the World, writer Jimmy Burns explores the history of soccer...
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Documents from the planned 1936 'Spanish Olympiad' have now been digitized and published by the University of Warwick.
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A new film based on the novel Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes will be directed by Michael Mann, who has directed other films such as Public Enemies, and Heat.
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Wreckage from a Ju-87 'Stuka' has recently been found in the Baltic Sea.
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Robert Capa's start as a war photographer in the Spanish Civil War and his later career are discussed in the "Photographers on Photography" series on the Imaging Resources website.
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Café Gijón, the famed salon in Madrid now faces closure in the wake of financial difficulties.
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This coming fall, the life of one of the Spanish Civil War's 4,000 “lost children” will be adapted for the big screen. María Luisa Toole, the film’s inspiration and central focus, fled her home in San Sebastian, Spain at the age of 11 in 1937 and did not see her mother for 15 years...
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Last week, Maria Sans, who inspired Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, died in Mataro, Spain at the age of 91. Set during the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the story of Robert Jordan, an American in the International Brigades, and his relationship with a volunteer nurse named...
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Despite an economic bailout, the future may still not be bright for Spain's economy. Financial experts say that while the country's banks have lost substantial amounts of money in the real estate crash, "Spain's job woes are due largely to labor laws that protect older workers at the expense of younger ones," writes...
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Next Sunday, the right-wing Chilean group La Corporación 11 de Septiembre will hold an event in honor of Augusto Pinochet, one of the most violent dictators of all time. The event will take place in Santiago's Caupolicán Theater, and according to the Unión de Oficiales en Retiro de la Defensa Nacional, 1,500 out 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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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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