Why was the United States so reluctant to support the Spanish Republic? What prompted Roosevelt’s reactionary attitude to the struggle of Spanish democracy against fascism? Isolationism and FDR’s fear of losing the Catholic vote played a role—but they are not the whole story. President Franklin D. Roosevelt has long been an iconic figure for...
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The ALBA collection at NYU’s Tamiment Library is an extraordinary trove of documents, images, and artifacts chronicling the lives of the almost 3,000 American men and women who joined the Spanish Civil War. It collection represents about ten percent of these volunteers—a respectable sampling. But is it representative?
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The notion that the Spanish Civil War ended on April 1, 1939 is a convention that is as taken for granted—in textbooks, scholarship and the media—as, say, the date of Franco’s death, November 20, 1975. Yet the death of Franco is a fact, while the establishment of the end of the war in 1939...
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Photography is a powerful teaching tool. Last April, a group of American students and I met Ricard Martínez in front of a pharmacy on Barcelona’s Carrer de Diputació to follow the steps that Agustí Centelles, one of the most important photographers of the Spanish Civil War, had taken on July 19, 1936, the first...
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Catalonia’s desire for independence has resurged in recent years, thanks in large part to the intransigence of the central Spanish government in Madrid. Historian Eric Smith reviews the history and background of the Catalan independence movement.
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James D. Fernandez, New York University Eighty years ago this week, in the Spanish North African enclave of Melilla, a group of right-wing generals staged a military coup, aimed at overthrowing Spain’s democratically elected government. The July 1936 uprising unleashed what would come to be known – somewhat inaccurately – as the Spanish Civil...
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In 1949 Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior under Franklin Roosevelt, described General Francisco Franco as a “mimic of Hitler” whose regime “chokes the breath out of liberty in a police state.” Four years later, The Christian Century, a liberal Protestant magazine, called Spain “that pathetic remnant of medievalism.” The Spanish Civil War...
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Diverse opinion abounds with regards to Hemingway’s actions during and after Spain’s Civil War. The Spanish journalist and diplomat Álvarez del Vayo recalled that “I talked with him in Madrid and I realized the Spanish war was fundamentally alien to him. Hemingway’s was the Spain of the running of the bulls at...
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There are numerous comparisons that can be made between the conflict in Syria and the Spanish Civil War. Both conflicts feature a ruthless dictator, appalling loss of life, war crimes and the massive displacement of tens of thousands of refugees. However, such superficial comparisons apply to many other conflicts. Merely in terms of...
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Lily Margaret Powell was born in March 1913, one of nine children, at Cwm Farm, Llangenny, where her father farmed a small Welsh hill farm. She attended the village school, leaving home aged 16 to train as a nurse, first in Essex, later in London at St Giles’, Camberwell, and St Olave’s, Rotherhithe –...
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