Today,a group of about twenty “Friends and Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” and three ALBA Board members (J. Fernández, G. Herrman and Marina Garde), visited the Jarama battlefield. From the vantage point of an appropriately makeshift memorial to British volunteer Kit Conway and other fallen British volunteers, we surveyed the valley and points of...
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Judge Baltasar Garzón welcomes the news that ETA, the terrorist organization that fights for Basque independence, has announced a definitive end to its armed struggle, El País reports from Seattle, WA. From Seattle, Garzón travels regularly to Colombia, where he is working as Special Advisor to the Mission to Support the Peace...
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Marina Garde and James D. Fernández, who represented ALBA at the unveiling of the new memorial to the International Brigades yesterday in Madrid, send along photos:
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On October 22, 1936, exactly 75 years ago, President Largo Caballero signed the decree which brought into existence the International Brigades. Today, several hundred people, including four IB veterans, three representatives of ALBA, and a considerable contingent of Friends and Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, attended the inauguration of a monument to the...
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Jim Jump, our IBMT friend from across the pond, sends along stirring video footage and a slide show from the October 1 gala in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the IB's founding. Here's a film by Sanum Ghafoor based on the IBMT gala evening in London on 1 October, including excerpts from the performances and interviews...
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Philosophy Football, the British company that recently sponsored the 75th anniversary gala honoring the British International Brigaders, have come out with a new T-shirt for "Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade." For more tees inspired by the IBs and Spanish Civil War, see here . See here, and click "dissenters."
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The events commemorating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigades have begun. Tomorrow will see the unveiling of a new, 12-foot monument to the IB on the campus of the Universidad Complutense, featuring the three-pointed star and the famous lines with with Dolores Ibárruri bade farewell the the IBers in October...
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Yolanda (Bobby) Hall, life-long activist and widow of Lincoln veteran Chuck Hall, is being honored by the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group at its annual gala on November 12, featuring the author Barbara Ehrenreich. See here for a 1999 interview with Bobby as part of the Working Women's History Project....
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A hundred-year-old man is helped up on to a plastic milk crate, and prepares to address the crowd at Occupy Wall Street. “Mic check” shouts the facilitator, and her words are repeated by the crowd in a kind of reverse echo, moving in concentric circles from the milk crate out in all directions. The...
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Our friends at the IBMT alert us to a new 27-minute film by Javier Pascal and Cristina Ciobanu about the International Brigades, featuring extensive interviews with British volunteers David Lomon and Thomas Watters and songs from the "Goodbye Barcelona" musical. See the film here.
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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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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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