Translation of remarks made by the President of the Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI), Ana Pérez, at the inauguration of the monument to the International Brigades at Ciudad Universitaria, Madrid, Spain. October 22, 2011. A monument to the International Brigades is, above all, a monument to international solidarity. And in this...
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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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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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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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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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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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