Given recent events in Spain, Helen Graham writes in today's Independent "Paul Preston's monumental, rigorous and unflinching study" of repression in the Spanish Civil War has become "important and opportune in ways that reach far beyond the purely academic." Preston's The Spanish Holocaust, which will be released in the US next month, traces "the...
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Another hurdle has been cleared in the fight against impunity in Guatemala, in which the winners of this year's ALBA/Puffin Human Rights Award have played a seminal role. This morning the Associated Press reports:
A former U.S.-backed dictator who presided over one of the bloodiest periods of Guatemala’s civil war has no...
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Peter N. Carroll, ALBA's chair emeritus, will give the annual Len Crome lecture organized by our British friends in the International Brigade Memorial Trust this coming Saturday, March 3, at 2:30pm, at London's Imperial War Museum. Peter will speak on "“The Spanish Civil War in the 21st Century: From Guernica to Human Rights."...
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Judge Baltasar Garzón, whose career was terminated recently by the Spanish Supreme Court, received a standing ovation from Argentina's Congress as President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner thanked him, on behalf of "millions of Argentines," for his groundbreaking work in defense of human rights (video here.) Garzón's disbarment, President Kirchner said, is "an offense...
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Within a couple of days' time, the last surviving German and Scottish volunteers of the Spanish Civil War, Fritz Teppich and Thomas Watters, passed away. Victor Grossman sends us a note on Teppich (below); an obit from Neues Deutschland is here (in German). A BBC obit for Watters is here; a brief...
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In an ostensible attempt to save face, the Spanish Supreme Court absolved Judge Baltasar Garzón yesterday from "prevarication," or knowingly making a decision against the law, in relation to Garzón's opening of an investigation into crimes against humanity committed by the Franco regime during and after the Spanish Civil War (NYTimes, Guardian)....
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ALBA's James D. Fernández is interviewed by the Spanish press about the baffling court case around Garzón's stay as holder of NYU's King Juan Carlos I Chair. The case was eventually closed. Read the interview here (in Spanish).
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The online magazine FronteraD just published a polemical review (in Spanish) by me of a David Rieff's polemical book Against Remembrance. Read it here.
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James D. Fernández, vice-chair of ALBA and professor of Spanish at NYU, has an op-ed in today's El País commenting on some of the more Kafkaesque chapters of the witch-hunt against Judge Garzón--and the collateral damage inflicted on those who found themselves in the crossfire. Read the piece here.
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ALBA is proud to announce its 2012 teaching institutes for high school teachers, made possible by the Puffin Foundation and donors like you: March 17, 2012: Professional development day in Seattle, co-hosted by the Center for Spanish Studies and the Division of Spanish and Portuguese of the University of Washington, with Anthony Geist, Peter Carroll,...
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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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