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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(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008) Review published in American Studies, Vol 50, Nos 3/4, Fall/Winter, 2009. This is an impressive piece of scholarship, which combines admirable bibliographic and archival research with clear, engaging prose. Throughout the book’s five main chapters, Schreiber painstakingly reconstructs the biographical and artistic trajectories of a talented and diverse...
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Robert Llopis is sending along the information on this year's Tribute to the International Brigades in Benissa (in Catalan, Spanish, and English):
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Cable Street in London’s East End, an area which is now predominantly Bengali as it had been predominantly Jewish in 1936, saw 1,000 people march this October 2 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the defeat of the attempt of the British Union of Fascists to stage their hate match through the area. See...
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The detailed list and timetable of the two-day conference in Madrid (Oct 20-21) to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigades, as well as a series of related events in Madrid before and after the conference, have been made available in two pdfs: Conference Program; Other Events.
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Between 300 and 600 bodies: that is how many researchers expect to find in a newly discovered mass grave near Jerez de la Frontera, in southern Spain, which is thought to have been the site of a Nationalist torture and detention center during the war, Público reports. Australia´s ABC News has more...
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Laurie Levinger's book on her uncle Sam Levinger's life, Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War, will be published later this year by Wipf and Stock:
Love and Revolutionary Greetings is the story of Sam Levinger, a young man who went to Spain in 1937 to join the Abraham...
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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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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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Self-effacing and shy though he was, Dr. Edward Barsky’s experience in Spain made him an outspoken activist, tireless organizer, innovative frontline surgeon, and political prisoner. “Eddie is a saint,” Hemingway wrote. “That’s where we put our saints in this country—in jail.”
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The Volunteer is thrilled to honor Dr. Barsky on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
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For Edward Barsky, political and humanitarian activism were two sides of the same coin. Those who persecuted him begged to differ.
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The time she spent in civil-war Spain loomed large in the life of Martha Gellhorn, the St. Louis-born war journalist. “The truth is that Martha could not stop thinking, feeling, and writing about her Spanish experiences.” “Objectivity bullshit.” That’s what Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) called the journalism of her day. Her letters to personalities like...
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Among the thousands of Jewish volunteers who joined the International Brigades were many descendants of the Sephardim. What was it like for them to “return” to Spain? Three case studies: Lini de Vries, César Covo, and Samuel Nahman, aka Manny Harriman.
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How the 22-year-old Jewish American dancer Janet Riesenfeld performed flamenco to help raise money for the Second Republic under fascist attack.
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Why did Jawaharlal Nehru, future prime minister of India, visit civil-war Spain in 1938? As it turned out, the triangular relationship between Britain, Spain, and India had deep cultural and geopolitical implications.
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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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