Nancy Wallach, daughter of Lincoln vet Hy Wallach, spoke recently at a gathering in the former concentration campo of San Pedro de Cardeña, where the Francoists held her father, along with Sidney Rosenblatt, Max Parker, Carl Geiser and many other IB prisoners of war (see the Jaily News blog). This is the...
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It was in 2006 that I first saw this phrase, on a button worn by a young man on the uptown 6 train. I was on the subway heading up to the Museum of the City of New York for a meeting related to the exhibition “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil...
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Felipe Blasco sends us a detailed report on the IB tribute in Barcelona, with some nice pictures of the Friends and Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Read the report (in Spanish) here.
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The Associazione Italiana Combattenti Volontari Antifascisti di Spagna (AICVAS) has posted a video report of the events surrounding the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigades. Watch it here.
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Jim Jump writes: This image was seen by millions of TV viewers in Britain and Spain during the live broadcast on Saturday night (November 12th) of an England-Spain soccer game in London (which Spain lost, by the way). The placard appeared on screen for several seconds during the two-minute silence for Britain’s war dead...
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The commemorations celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigades came at the very end of a strange never-ending summer. The blue skies that presided over inauguration of the new monument to the IB in Madrid in October were gone within a day or two. On a cool, overcast day earlier...
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From News of Spain, November 9, 1938 New Pellagra Cure to Madrid Thirty-nine of America’s leading scientists, incuding three Nobel Laureates and thirteen members of the National Academy of Sciences, joined last week in sending to pellagra victims in Madrid a special gift of twenty-five pounds of nicotinic acid, the newly discovered cure for...
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I’m feeling a bit guilty for having subjected the students in my graduate seminar this week to the viewing of all 77 minutes of Defenders of the Faith, a pro-Franco documentary filmed between 1936 and 1938 by the American journalist Russell Palmer. The film is narrated by Palmer himself. To assuage my conscience, I’ve...
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Trisha Ziff’s Mexican Suitcase opens in Cine Luchana (Madrid) on November 11th. Screening times: 4:30pm and 8:30pm.
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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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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.
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On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
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In 1944, Barsky wrote A Surgeon Goes to War, an 18-chapter memoir of his time in Spain, which was never published but can be consulted at NYU’s Tamiment Library. This is the first chapter.
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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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