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
Trisha Ziff, the curator and filmmaker who was instrumental in the recovery of the "Mexican Suitcase," is interviewed in El País about her documentary Mexican Suitcase, which retraces the miraculous journey of the more than 4,000 Spanish Civil War negatives from Paris to Mexico to New York. A reflection on memory, history,...
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The exhibit featuring the more than 4,000 Spanish Civil War images by Robert Capa, "Chim" Seymour and Gerda Taro that were recovered from the so-called "Mexican Suitcase" have begun their travels after their initial display at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. They are now on show in Arles, France, Artdaily...
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Re: Spain Confronts Years of Pain Over Lost Babies Congratulations are due to the New York Times for your excellent front-page coverage of this terrifying story. Many of us hope you might be able to give similar prominent coverage to a much larger and related story: that of the over 100,000 victims of 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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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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