Dan Carrier remembers the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War with a portrait of his great-uncle Nat Cohen, IBer from the UK, and some of his buddies:
A garment worker from the East End, he had already seen political street-fighting, was a regular draw at Communist Party meetings...
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Justice, Spanish Style
According to today's issue of Público:
1. Judge Baltasar Garzón initiates an investigation into the forced disappearance and/or assasination of 113,000 Spaniards by Francoist forces.
2. Judge Baltasar Garzón is accused of judicial malfeasance (prevaricación) for having initiated that investigation, and is suspended from his post as a Judge.
3. An Argentine judge, invoking...
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Veteran Olavi Kantola was killed in Spain when he was in his very early twenties. His nephew Bob got in contact with ALBA when he found out that his Uncle was a member of the Lincoln Brigade
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Over the years, I’ve had a chance to help a significant number of high school and college students and teachers wade into the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. Visitors are almost always taken by the immediacy of the primary sources contained in ALBA. For folks used to the apparent omniscience and neutrality of history textbooks,...
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Dublin: Friday 15 July A public meeting, “75 years on – the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War”, will be held at 7pm in the Teachers Club, 36 Parnell Square, Dublin 1. The meeting is organised by éirígí to mark the 75th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War and to...
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On 25 June 2011, Manus O'Riordan (Ireland Secretary of the International Brigade Memorial Trust) gave the following address during the Fourth Annual George Brown Commemoration at Woodstock Gardens, Inistioge, Co. Kilkenny, where an olive grove was rededicated in memory of four Kilkenny International Brigade volunteers. Read the speech here (pdf).
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Around 100 people including Italians, British, Americans and Australians commemorated the 74th anniversary of the battle of Brunete with a walk across the roads that were used by the Republican army to approach to the Brunete battlefield. The Italian contingent posted a video.
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A commemorative concert to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, "The Song of Songs," will be performed at Bridewell Hall, London EC4Y 8EQ, featuring Caroline Barnes (violin), Miguel Calvo (cello), Michael Chant (piano), Tom Chant (saxophone), Robert Coleridge (piano), Philip Edwards (clarinet), Alys Hewer (flute), Lesley Larkum (viola), and Catherine Pluygers (oboe)....
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Spain's national evening news evening covered last weekend's London celebration commemorating the creation of the International Brigades 75 years ago. The segment, which begins about 12m:30s into the broadcast, includes footage UK veterans David Lomon and Thomas Watters. See the whole program here. The anniversary attracted considerable media attention, including an editorial in...
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Trisha Ziff's 90-minute documentary Mexican Suitcase is poised for its United States premiere at the Laliff-Los Angeles Latino Film Festival on July 24th (order tickets here). In Europe it was screened on July 5 at the prestigious Rencontres, Europe's most important photography festival, held in Arles, France, and the
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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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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