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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While poking around ancestry.com, I somehow ended up in a cache of documents from the National Archives and Records Administration –“Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1835 – 1974- Spain, 1930-1939.” As you can imagine, each document there is the germ of a novel or film, and, not surpisingly, there are a significant...
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(Texto en castellano.) The astoundingly profound and widespread contributions of Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón to the promotion of justice and human rights have been everywhere on display these last two weeks of October (October 16-30, 2011). Though not always acknowledged in the headlines and soundbytes that are streaming in these days from...
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Two-thirds of the way into Trisha Ziff’s brilliant documentary about the re-discovery in Mexico of 4,500 Spanish Civil War photographic negatives of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour, two Mexican intellectuals comment on the donation of that vast archive to the International Center of Photography in New York. Photographer Pedro Meyer openly says...
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ALBA's Human Rights Film Series opens tonight in the Museum of the City of New York with the must-see documentary Impunity (2011; trailer), by Hollman Morris and Juan José Lozano. Impunity investigates the sudden interruption to “peace and justice” process in Colombia due to the political and economic interests of the...
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The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), one of the co-sponsors of ALBA's Human Rights Film Series this coming weekend, has just published an interview with Trisha Ziff, director of The Mexican Suitase, one of the documentaries screened there. Listen to it here.
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On Friday, the same day the film opens at movie theaters in Spain, Trisha Ziff's gripping documentary The Mexican Suitcase is being screened at ALBA's Human Rights Film Festival (Museum of the City of New York, tickets here, trailer here). See here for coverage in the Spanish press today. The Suitcase...
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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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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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After the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, the Seegers family did not hesitate to join the resistance. They had experience fighting fascism: their son Piet had fought for the Spanish Republic. When Tom King started digging into his family history seventy years later, he fell from one surprise into the other.
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Tina Modotti’s short life took her from Italy to North Beach and from there to Mexico, Berlin, Moscow, and civil-war Spain. Rightly known as a pathbreaking modernist photographer, she was also a radical activist. “Modotti spent the second part of her working life fighting for revolution.”
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Kirsten Weld has spent years studying Latin American dictatorships and the citizens who fight to hold them accountable. That experience has proven valuable in her current role as president of the AAUP chapter at Harvard, which, in March, sued the federal government for targeting students and faculty—and won.
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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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