Investigations continue into the scandal of thousands of stolen and illegally adopted Spanish newborns, a practice that begun during the Franco years but continued well into the democratic period. See last week's CBS item here; previous Volunteer coverage here.
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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 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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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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Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
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Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
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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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