On March 27, 1938, Avelino González Mallada, former mayor of the Asturian city of Gijón, died in a car crash on a country road in Woodstock, Virginia. The next day, The New York Times explained that “Señor Mallada was in this country on a sixty-day permit granted to him by the Department of Labor after...
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A Spaniard named Carlos Rodríguez del Risco was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen from 1940 to 1945. Although he was sympathetic to the Spanish Republic when he went into exile at the end of the Spanish Civil War, he became hostile to the Republican cause during his deportation and imprisonment. He...
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Patience Darton must be one of the few people ever to describe Ernest Hemingway as ‘charming and humble.’ She recorded her impression of him in a letter written from Valencia after meeting him there in the spring of 1937. No doubt he had been pleased to meet an attractive, blonde, English nurse, eager to...
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The great majority of books on 20th-century history treat the period from 1917 to 1991 as one of unremitting rivalry between Soviet communism and Western capitalist democracy, a rivalry suspended from mid-1941 to mid-1945 by the need of both parties to defend themselves against Nazi-Fascist-Japanese military aggression. They say very little, or speak disparagingly,...
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(English version here.) A finales del año 2004 un buen amigo encontró, por casualidad, un grafiti en una pared de la ermita de San Gregorio en el municipio de Aguaviva (Teruel) hecho el día de Navidad de 1937 por el brigadista americano Edward Muscala. Aguaviva es el pueblo donde nació mi padre; aunque mi...
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(Versión en castellano aquí.) At the end of 2004 a good friend  of mine found, by chance, a piece of graffiti on a wall in the chapel of San Gregorio in the town of Aguaviva (Teruel). It had been written on Christmas Day 1937 by Edward Muscala, an American member of the International...
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(En inglés.) Si existieran agencias de calificación crediticia que se dedicaran a evaluar el estado moral de las instituciones de un país, ayer “España”, sin duda, habría sido devaluado al status de “bonos basura”. Su Tribunal Supremo abrió el primer juicio de tres contra el Juez Baltasar Garzón, iniciando así su ataque tri-partito...
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Young men volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War for many reasons, but few American volunteers came from privileged backgrounds. When I saw 1938 and Calaceite, Spain, on a list of Williams College men who died in World War II, I was introduced to Barton Carter. The full story of Carter’s radicalization and...
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Part of the difficulty in studying Kea’s life—and what makes her story so intriguing—is that subtle details change from memoir to memoir. Over the last three years, I have travelled to archives in the United States and England tracking down information about Kea, and yet I am still piecing together her story. The process...
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Viewing seven documentaries about the Lincoln Brigade in two days, a curious thing happened: I had difficulty telling them apart. Not, of course, in their broad sweep. Rather, it was in the details, and more specifically in the archival footage, where I had difficulty distinguishing them.
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