The Tate Modern's Marko Daniel--co-curator of Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, up until September--blogs on Miró's Still Life with an Old Shoe, often considered to be the Catalan painter's "Guernica":
Just before starting on the still-life he wrote, ‘We are living through a terrible drama, everything happening in Spain is terrifying...
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PBS has just uploaded the 20-minute segment from next week's episode of History Detectives featuring the story of Lincoln volunteers Sol Fellman and Doug Roach. Watch the segment here:
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The Village Soup previews next week's episode of the PBS series History Detectives, which interviewed Matti Mattson for a segment on the friendship between Lincoln volunteers Sol Fellman and Doug Roach (more details here):
Ilona Mattson described her father as a vigorous and youthful man who went to the gym twice...
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Writing for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, Raphael Minder explains the continuing controversies in Spain over Franco and his legacy:
the war and its victor,Francisco Franco, still generate plenty of heated debate in Spain. One of the unexpected and...
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The Association of Friends of the International Brigades (AABI) has just announced the Fifth Brunete Memorial March, to be held in Spain on July 2. See for more information the flyer (pdf).
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In response to the Guardian´s request for father's day letters, Julie Norton writes to her father, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who died in 1958:
I was too young and self-absorbed to appreciate that actually you were a hero, a veteran of the Spanish civil war. You didn't see much...
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Guy Hedgecoe covers the continuing controversy over the Valle de los Caídos for the Deutsche Welle:
Three decades after the transition to democracy that followed Franco's death, the Socialist government intends now to turn the monument into a symbol of reconciliation between the two sides in the Civil War, which started...
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The AP reports:
Spanish prosecutors are investigating 849 cases of newborn children stolen from their mothers and sold to other families for profit, the country's attorney general said Friday. Candido Conde-Pumpido said 162 cases had already been referred for trial and only 38 have been dropped for a lack of evidence. It is well...
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Bernard-Henry Lévy pays tribute to Jorge Semprún, the Spanish novelist and public intellectual who died earlier this month:
He had the eyes of a warrior, but his gaze became veiled and a bit haunted when he spoke of "his" dead -- glorious elders of the Spanish Civil War, companions of the maquis...
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Our friend Manus O'Riordan writes:
On June 6, 2011, Athol Books of Belfast, Northern Ireland, published a new web booklet on its site entitled The Vindication of Brigadista and Union Man Jack James Larkin Jones: in refutation of the British intelligence campaign of character assassination. This booklet brings together a series of five articles written...
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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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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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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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