The Orphan Film Symposium DVD containing the recovered and restored film With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, by Henri-Cartier-Bresson and Herb Kline, was just award for "Most Original Contribution to Film History" at the prestigious Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy. It was the scholar and ALBA friend Juan Salas who, while conducting research on...
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The British media are considering the ramifications of the information contained in the MI5 files on the Spanish Civil War and International Brigades that were released two days ago. Here is a piece in the Guardian by SCW scholar Tom Buchanan; here a segment on the topic from Channel 4 news with...
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Spanish Civil War scholar Len Tsou sends us the following note from Athens:
While waiting for a solution to sail for Gaza, I went to the rally at Syntagma square during the 48 Hrs general strike. I saw a familiar banner attached here.
The UK National Archives have just released a large cache of records related to the British participation in the Spanish Civil War. From the press release:
More volunteers may have left Britain with the aim of joining the International Brigades in Spain than previously thought according to documents discovered at The National Archives.
The Dartmouth Alumni magazine just ran this tribute I wrote a long time ago to one of my undergraduate mentors, Robert Russell. I thought it might be of interest to you ALBA blog readers as well. Salud. Why Blue?
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Spanish singer and songwriter, Javier Molina, has recorded a new version of "Jarama Valley"
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The media are overflowing with commemorations of Ernest Hemingway, who killed himself fifty years ago. Here's Clancy Sigal in The Guardian:
In previous months, he had submitted to more than 15 punishing ECT (electroshock convulsive) treatments at the Mayo clinic, due, in part, to his fear that the FBI was shadowing him....
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Our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust across the pond send along their press release about the 75th anniversary celebration on July 2 in London:
75th anniversary tribute to Spanish Civil War volunteers
British volunteers of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War will be remembered at 1pm on Saturday 2 July 2011 at the International...
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The legendary anti-Francoist Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura, whose classic Cría cuervos (1975) has just been theatrically re-released in the UK, speaks with The Guardian's Giles Tremlett:
Saura, now 79, has little cause to remember his own childhood with nostalgia, since he is old enough to remember the most painful event in Spain's recent history:...
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Picasso's daughter-in-law doesn't like the political nature of latest exhibit at the Picasso museum in Málaga. The Independent's Andrew Birch covers the story:
The new show, "Viñetas en el frente" (Cartoons on the front line), is unashamedly partisan, consisting of Republican posters and cartoons from the Spanish Civil War, and famous anti-Nazi...
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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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