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
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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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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