A group of cyclists will set off from Edinburgh next Monday (19 September) for a tour of Britain and Ireland to remember the volunteers from the British Isles who joined the International Brigades.
Organised by the National Clarion Cycling Club 1895 (NCCC), the IBMT-supported ride will mark the 75th anniversary of the formation of the...
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This week's issue of Newsweek covers the documentary Mexican Suitcase (trailer, Kickstarter), which is also screened this week at the San Sebastián Film Festival (Sept. 19 & 20, details here), for the DocMiami International Film Festival, and as opening feature for the AFI Latin American Film Festival in Silver Spring, MD, on...
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Alan Warren writes: Nacho Eli Garcia, historian and expert on San Pedro de Cardena prison, where International Brigaders were held (He is also the creator of the excellent blog "The Jaily News"), has just announced that over the weekend of November 4th to 6th an International conference, exhibition and memorialisation will be...
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This year's Teaneck International Film Festival, held November 11-13, will feature a screening of the classic Spanish Civil War documentary The Good Fight, by Mary Dore and Sam Sills. More details here.
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Judge Baltasar Garzón, recipient of the first ALBA-Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, will speak at Harvard University's Law School on the topic of "International Crimes and Universal Jurisdiction." September 26, 2011, 12:00 - 1:30 pm. Location: Harvard Law School, Pound Hall 213, 1563 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge; Contact: hrp@law.harvard.edu
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Under the heading “New theories about a 20th century icon” El País reports that José Luis Alcaine has found extremely interesting parallels between the film version of Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms, and Picasso’s Guernica. Alcaine, a director of photography who has worked with Pedro Almodóvar and Victor Erice, summarises his conclusions...
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"The discovery of 4,500 photographic negatives shot by famed war photographers Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David "Chim" Seymour during the Spanish Civil War is given respectful treatment in writer-director Trisha Ziff's Mexican Suitcase," Robert Koehler writes in Variety:
The thrilling frontline photography -- unique in its era -- serves here to illustrate the...
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Picasso's best known work, the Guernica, will not be moved to the Basque Country, as the Basque National Party had requested, EITB reports:
The Spanish Senate's Committee on Culture on Wednesday rejected a proposal by the PNV to amend the law regulating the Reina Sofia National Museum of Art, in...
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The BBC World Service recently broadcast the 10-minute program Child evacuees from the Spanish Civil War, in which Herminio Martínez talks about his experiences as Basque child refugee. Listen to the program here.
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Ben Hughes' They Shall Not Pass: The British Battalion at Jarama (buy) is reviewed positively by Steve Andrew in the Morning Star:
Opinions differ on whether Jarama really was the victory that republicans claimed at the time, but the one thing that does emerge with some certainty from this...
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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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We talk about the “return” of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain, even though that massive painting had never been here before its “repatriation” in 1981. The magnificent show “Ben Shahn: On Non-Conformity” curated by Laura Katzman and on display until February 26 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, elicits a similar sense:...
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Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
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Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
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When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
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Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
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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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