(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 Last Hero of the Battle of the Ebro," reads the headline in El País reporting the discovery of the remains of a Republican soldier last week, during an excavation of trenches that made up the last line of defense in the last moments of the famous Spanish Civil War battle. Given...
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David Granville reviews Michael Quinn's new biography of Michael O'Riordan, former IRA member, International Brigader and Irish Communist Party leader for over four decades, for the Morning Star:
Quinn's book, covering the years 1938-1947, spans O'Riordan's return from Spain - where he had continued the fight against fascism begun in...
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José Sanchís Sinisterra 1987 blockbuster Spanish Civil War play ¡Ay Carmela!, very successfully adapted to the screen by Carlos Saura in 1990, has just opened in a new production at the GALA Hispanic Theater under the direction of José Luis Arellano García. The show is "stirring" and "eloquent", Celia Wren wrote...
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James Salter reviews Hemingway's Boat, Paul Hendrickson's new biography of the writer of For Whom the Bell Tolls, in the latest NYRB:
Hemingway’s Boat, which covers the last twenty-seven years of Hemingway’s life, from 1934 to 1961, is not, as is made clear at the beginning, a conventional biography....
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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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