Leonora Carrington, the last living Surrealist, long-time friend of Spanish Republicans, and later wife of Robert Capa's friend Cziki Weiss, died in Mexico City this week. The Times has a long obituary:
Leonora Carrington, a British-born Surrealist and onetime romantic partner of Max Ernst whose paintings depicted women and half-human beasts floating...
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I’ve been away for some days, and haven’t had time to catch up with the press coverage of the 15-May movement in Spain. But one of the messages I found in my cluttered inbox upon my return contained this link to photos of the violent disbandment of the peaceful protesters that took place today...
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The regional and municipal elections on Sunday in Spain confirmed the Left's worst fears, as the ruling Socialist Party was routed and the conservative Partido Popular achieved its largest electoral victory in its history, predicting a similar victory in next year's general election--although not all the votes that the Socialists lost went to the...
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The exhumation of the body of Chilean President Salvador Allende, at the request of his family, is expected to shed light on the still murky circumstances surrounding his death during the September 1973 coup that inaugurated the bloody regime of General Augusto Pinochet. The New York Times reports:
after nearly 38 years...
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In the slide show we prepared for the Pete Seeger benefit concert last October, we incorporated a photograph of Lincoln vets marching in the 1946 New York May Day Parade. As it turns out, there is also moving footage of this parade. See the clip here; the Lincolns make there appearance around the...
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The students in my undergraduate seminar –“Spain in New York”– and I are in the process of uploading to a word-press blog the results of our research about the history and current presence of Spain and Spanish culture in New York. The recent rally of Spanish ex-pats at the foot of the Washington Square...
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Even for a Spanish news junkie like myself, it is hard to comprehend and convey the significance of the recent massive meetings of citizens in Spain’s symbolic center –the Puerta del Sol in Madrid– and in many other cities in Spain, and now, it seems, around the world. Here’s what I understand of the...
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On Tuesday, May 17th, a group of people gathered at Madrid’s Athenaeum to remember and pay tribute to the heroic men and women who joined the International Brigades 75 years ago.
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Now available for online viewing: the speech that Larry Cox, Executive Director of Amnesty International, USA, gave on Saturday May 14 in New York City on the occasion of the first ALBA/Puffin Human Rights Award for Judge Baltasar Garzón:
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Now available for online viewing: the speech that Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, gave on Saturday May 14 in New York City on the occasion of the first ALBA/Puffin Human Rights Award for Judge Baltasar Garzón:
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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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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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From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.
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On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
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In 1944, Barsky wrote A Surgeon Goes to War, an 18-chapter memoir of his time in Spain, which was never published but can be consulted at NYU’s Tamiment Library. This is the first chapter.
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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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