Known mostly for his cosmic surrealist and modernist paintings, a new side of Spanish artist Joan Miró is currently on display at Los Angeles' National Art Gallery. The show, entitled "Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape" will be on display until August 12, and showcases Miró's political works. As sacbee.com reports, "People often...
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Joining forces with ProPublica, Ira Glass's This American Life recently featured Fredy Peccerelli and Kate Doyle, winners of the 2012 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, in an extensive and gripping piece of reportage focusing on the case of Dos Erres. Dos Erres is a remote farming town in rural Guatemala were more...
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"How do you bring tolerance and democracy to a country in which a murderous military, which over the years killed some two hundred thousand of its own citizens, is effectively still in power?," the New Yorker's Peter Canby asks in a piece about Fredy Peccerelli and Kate Doyle, winners of the 2012 ALBA/Puffin...
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Ten men were arrested by Spanish police officers on the suspicion of illegally possessing war weapons, in addition to an array of vintage firearms from the Spanish Civil War and World War II.
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An article last month about the fate of veterans who fought with the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion by Canadian author Terrence Rundle West has spurred new discussion over whether the Mac-Paps should be honored in Remembrance Day celebrations or if their cause is unworthy of remembrance as they traveled to Spain against the direct wishes...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigades Archives celebrated the Brigade's 76th anniversary last Sunday in Berkeley, California by honoring Lincoln Brigader Delmer Berg, and activists Kate Doyle and Fredy Peccerelli.
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In this 1983 interview with Martha Gellhorn, the renowned journalist, novelist, and war correspondent discusses in great length her views regarding the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Vietnam War, among other human rights-threatening historical events. Throughout the nearly half-hour long conversation, Gellhorn staunchly lambasts the idiocy of...
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Canción Gitana, an international flamenco dance company, will present a distinctive take on the life of legendary Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, reports sussexexpress.co.uk. The dance-biography will feature myriad narrators, guitarists, and dancers and will cover the entire scope of Lorca's life, from birth to his tragic assassination by the Phalangists, all in...
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Is the violent dictatorial conflict in Syria comparable to that of Spain in the 1930s? Over the past week a number of opinions regarding this subject matter have been published on the Internet, including that of international affairs expert Barry Rubin. Stated Rubin in a recent blog post:
In several respects, the Syrian civil...
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Yvonne Scholten, biographer of the Dutch miliciana Fanny Schoonheyt, are interested in obtaining information on the Dutch Lincoln Brigade volunteer Bart van der Schelling. He was admired as a baritone–he recorded Songs of the Spanish Civil War, a number of them with Pete Seeger. In later life he acquired a reputation as a primitive painter. He and...
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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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