As a child growing up in Madrid, I frequently used to ask my mom, María Luisa Jerez Marín, about her parents, whom I had never met. My grandmother, Modesta Marín, died of cancer at the early age of 42. And my grandfather, Arturo Martín, I was told ‘died in the war’, like so many...
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“This is the most photogenic war anyone ever has seen.”* Estas palabras transcritas por Claud Cockburn carecían, en plena guerra civil, de perspectiva, mas no de perspicacia. Cierta magia hubo en esta contienda que la convirtió en epifanía de un nuevo tipo de conflicto bélico: violento y despiadado para una población civil que fotógrafos,...
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Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain until 1975, was obsessed with the notion of a powerful international conspiracy—led by Jews, Masons, Communists, and other “reds”— against the “new” Spain that emerged from his victory in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. He referred to this plot in the very last speech he gave on October...
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Among many other Spanish Civil War commemorations this year, it may be interesting to note that July 2013 marks the 75th anniversary of one of the conflict’s most bizarre episodes. In December 2005, Professor Sandie Holguín of the University of Oklahoma published a piece of research in the American Historical Review, was based on...
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Several hundred undocumented migrants die each year of heatstroke or at the hands of organized crime as they attempt to cross the deserts of Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. Law enforcement officials struggle to identify the bodies, while families in Mexico and Central America wait anxiously, not knowing what happened to their relatives.
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President Barack Obama has escalated the Bush administration’s use of targeted killing with drones and other methods. Drones, which avoid U.S. casualties, are more palatable to the American people than ground invasions such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 366 U.S. drone attacks that have killed more 3581 people in Pakistan...
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Paul Preston is impossible to avoid. Author of twelve books, editor of several more, and director of an important series on the subject, he towers mile-high in the landscape of Spanish Civil War scholarship. And yet in person he can be quite elusive. A previously arranged meeting for an interview in London first had...
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La crisis económica española que muchos pensaron pasajera se vuelve interminable. En un intento desesperado por comprender qué ha ocurrido y qué cabe esperar del futuro próximo, prácticamente todo el mundo tiene un relato que da sentido a la situación actual.
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The economic crisis in Spain, which many thought short-lived, appears to have no end in sight. In a desperate attempt to understand what has happened and what the near future may bring, almost everyone has adopted a narrative that helps explain the situation and charts some way forward.
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Antonio Frasconi, the great graphic artist, illustrator, teacher and humanitarian, created this woodcut of the Lincoln Memorial, which resides in the nation’s capitol next to the famous words of the Gettysburg address, “That government, of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” He titled this 1956...
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