Philip Kaufman's new film on Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, a significant part of which is set in Civil War Spain, premiers this coming Sunday, May 28, on HBO. The story is picked up by NPR and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others.
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Lydia Syson, author of the forthcoming A World Between Us, which tells the story of the Spanish Civil War to children, was interviewed about her work last week by Michael Rosen. See the video here.
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Archives of material about child refugees evacuated to the UK to escape the Spanish Civil War 75 years ago have gone online at the University of Warwick, as part of the largest English-language digital collection on the conflict. This week marks the 75th anniversary of the arrival of around 4,000 children from the Basque...
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The Spring/Summer issue of International Brigade Memorial Trust newsletter is out, with articles on: the restoration of the London IB monument in preparation of the annual July 7 commemoration; the miraculous discovery of a protrait of veteran David Lomon, sketched in a prisoner-of-war camp; the annual Len Crome lecture delivered by ALBA's...
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Billy Bragg, the Bard Of Barking, has just cut a new album to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, Let the Jukebox Keep Playing reports; the CD features, among other SCW songs, "Jarama Valley."
The disc also features Maxine Peake, backed by Urban Roots dub ensemble, as she...
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Adam Hochshild reviews Paul Preston's monumental The Spanish Holocaust for the New York Times (read an excerpt from the book in The Volunteer; other reviews here and here):
An eminent and prolific British historian of modern Spain, Preston says this was “an extremely painful book to write.”...
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The Observer's Sean O'Hagan reviews the translation of Susana Fortes's novelized version of the love affair between Spanish Civil War photographers Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, the film rights for which have been bought by Michael Mann:
Fortes's short novel is essentially a historical romance that concentrates on the relationship between...
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The electronic artist Grey Filastine connects efforts in Spain and Indonesia to confront a dictatorial past and achieve justice in the present, the Jakarta Globe reports:
“They’re excavating the mass graves, they’re going through the political process of changing the history books, of removing big statues of Franco, like all...
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A plaque has been unveiled in Sussex to commemorate the 4,000 Basque children brought to the county 75 years ago, the BBC reports:
The children were escaping the Spanish Civil War, and arrived on a ship from Bilbao. The ceremony took place in Blackboys, near Uckfield, where 20 children and...
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The work done by ALBA/Puffin Award winner Fredy Peccerelli and his team is absolutely essential, says his colleague José Suasnavar of the Guatemalan Association of Forensic Anthropology (FAFG), EFE reports In an interview with the prestigious Latin American academic institution FLACSO, Suasnavar describes the Guatemalan exhumation process in detail. Read it
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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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