How much does Spain’s 15-M movement owe to past political struggles? The protests that broke out on May 15, 2011 reveal an interesting convergence of the old and the new. On the one hand, the encampment at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid (Acampada Sol) was a 21st-century revolution driven by social media like...
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Harry W. Randall, Jr., once the chief photographer of the special photographic unit of the Fifteenth Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, died at a care facility in Snowflake, Arizona on November 11. His vast collection of photographs—which included not only his own camera work but a large array of negatives, albums of prints,...
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Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War (Eugene, Ore.: Resource Publications, 2012), by Laurie E. Levinger. The story of a young Jewish-American Socialist from Ohio who fought and died at the age of 20 in the Spanish Civil War.
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The Last English Revolutionary: Tom Wintringham, 1898-1949 (Brighton, Portland, Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), by Hugh Purcell with Phyll Smith. A very welcome “enlarged, revised and updated edition” of the biography of Tom Wintringham published originally in 2004.
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The War and its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century, by Helen Graham, Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2012. 250 pp. Many subjects thread through the pages of Helen Graham’s dense but brilliant meditation on the Spanish Civil War.
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The recent popularity of public commemorations of violent events from the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship has rubbed some academic historians the wrong way. “We’ve known about these events for years,” they say. “We’ve written dozens of books and articles about them. We know almost all there is to know about the...
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Among the nearly 3,000 U.S. volunteers who joined the International Brigades in Spain, there were two Chinese: Chi Chang (张纪) from Minnesota and Dong Hong Yick (his Chinese name: 陈文饶, Wen Rao Chen) from New York’s Chinatown. Chang survived the Spanish Civil War, but Yick was killed at Gandesa in 1938. Chi Chang came from...
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Parte primera: los relatos en declive (Version in English.) La crisis económica que muchos pensaron pasajera se vuelve interminable. Algunos aún se aferran al recuerdo de las últimas crisis españolas y confían en que queda poco para salir. Otros ven el camino de Grecia, o incluso el de otros países del sur que sufrieron...
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The economic crisis in Spain, which many thought short-lived, appears to have no end in sight. Everyone has a story—a narrative of the crisis that points to some responsible party, and claims to know whose feet should be held to the fire to begin finding some solutions.
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You’re all feet waiting / to do the saranda / tonight / hair-free and shoulders / swaying, laughing / because tomorrow you’ll / have to carry a column / of trays / of sardines on your head
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For forty-some years, until 1981, New York City was home to Picasso’s Guernica—painted in response to the destruction of the Basque city by the German Luftwaffe in April 1937. This past October, Guernica returned to New York symbolically as the city commemorated the 75th anniversary of the bombing with a program of events organized...
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Summary of the essay “Political surveillance measures against the soldiers of the rebel army: ‘Franco’s soldiers’ and their gradual hostility to and rejection of the war, December 1937-1939,” which received an Honorary Mention in the Graduate category of the 2012 Watt Award. In July 1936 the military forces stationed in Africa rose against the...
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“There is not a single one among the conservative or neo-Francoist historians who does not manipulate or skew the historical evidence. They sell bold-faced lies. This sounds harsh, I know. But I have proven it time and again. In Spain, the myths propagated by Francoism have survived, conveniently freshened up, and are mobilized in...
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Summary of the essay “El abrazo mortal de Franco: La participación de las tropas marroquíes en la Guerra Civil Española,” which earned an Honorary Mention in the Undergraduate category for the 2012 Watt Award. Although the Spanish Civil war is an extensively studied topic, the role of Spain’s neighboring country Morocco in this conflict...
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U.S. newspaper coverage of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade reveals the domestic and foreign policy debates that arose in the late 1930s and continued into the late 1950s. I focus on The Cleveland Plain Dealer, which was sympathetic to the cause of the Spanish Republic due to the left-leaning population of the greater Cleveland...
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In the latter half of the 1930s, 1,700 Canadians journeyed to Spain to defend the elected republic against General Francisco Franco’s military revolt. Decades later, as these men approached old age, they began pressing for official recognition from the Canadian government for their service in Spain; they were ultimately unsuccessful. A close analysis...
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ALBA’s George Watt Memorial Essay Prizes are awarded each year to a graduate student and an undergraduate student who have written an outstanding essay or thesis chapter about any aspect of the Spanish Civil War, the global political or cultural struggles against fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, or the lifetime histories and contributions of Americans who fought in support of the Spanish Republic. The...
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After organizing three successful professional development programs for high school teachers this spring—in Seattle, Tampa, and Oberlin, Ohio—ALBA launched three more in the autumn term in Alameda County, California, New York City, and Bergen County, New Jersey. As in the past, teachers are welcoming the presentation of fresh historical source material from the ALBA...
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The Franco regime let some 10,000 Spanish Republican exiles die in Nazi concentration camps. But one remarkable and little-told episode of Spanish aid to European Jewry is that of the Franco regime’s foreign minister stationed in Hungary, Ángel Sanz Briz, who managed to save 5,000 Hungarian Jews in his capacity as chargé d’affaires of...
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The past months have been a time of loss for the International Brigade community. Harry Randall, Adolphe Low, Jim Benét, David Lomon, and Albert Hirschman left us, as did Sylvia Thompson, widow of Lincoln Brigade and Second World War veteran Bob Thompson (1915-1965) and Dr. Moisès Broggi, the Catalan physician who headed up the...
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The Associated Press reports: Judges in Argentina have convicted three former navy officers of summarily executing 16 political prisoners, and called on the U.S. to extradite a fourth suspect living in Miami. The “Massacre of Trelew” in 1972 presaged the violence leading to Argentina’s bloody dictatorship four years later. The inmates were shot even...
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(English version.) Publicada el 6 de marzo de 2010 en la edición en línea de The Volunteer, como una versión extendida de la entrevista que apareció en el número de marzo de 2010 de la edición en papel de esa misma publicación. Traducción de Sara Plaza (civalleroyplaza.blogspot.com.es/) “Contar grandes historias a través de las...
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Dorothy Koppelman reads Picasso’s masterpiece through the lens of Aesthetic Realism, a movement founded by Eli Siegel on the idea that humanity should engage with the world through aesthetics: Here, in Pablo Picasso’s angry yet monumental memorial to Guernica, sudden and wanton killing is presented in flat, clearly outlined, yet agonizingly cut off shapes....
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Planning for your will and your legacy? The Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade established their legacy with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. Now you can continue their “good fight” by establishing a legacy gift to ALBA in your will. As a non-profit educational organization, 501(c)(3), ALBA can accept legacy gifts in any amount,...
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What role has poetry played in the way we think about the Spanish Civil War? Along with photography and film, it helped bring home the image of the Spanish Civil War as an idealistic struggle and a tragic catastrophe.
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Quick, identify the Canadian battalion that celebrates its 75th anniversary this month. If you didn’t guess the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion you’re not alone. Few would.
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With tears in my eyes I read the list of American brigaders who fought in Spain with the Spanish Republic. The only thing I can say as the grandson of anarchist combatant is thanks, thanks and thanks always for their heroic sacrifices beyond duty, beyond life itself. When I read those names I cannot...
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The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics, by Kathryn Sikkink (New York: Norton, 2011). One of the most shocking scenes in Mad Men, the popular TV series about the hard-drinking advertising scene of the 1960s, occurs in the pristine upstate New York countryside.
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The Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust, by Jerry Silverman. Jerry Silverman has written much more than a songbook. He brings to life the rise of fascism and the horror of the Holocaust in songs and text.
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Some say soccer is politics and others consider it poetry. Jimmy Burns and Simon Kuper lay bare the connections between what happened on the European fields and the world around them.
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What prompted the artist Robert Motherwell to devote over 40 years, from 1948 until his death in 1991, to a body of work entitled “Elegies to the Spanish Republic”?   Why did Motherwell, whom the noted critic Clement Greenberg considered “one of the very best of the Abstract Expressionist painters,” return to this theme in...
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Ohio, the quintessential swing state, has long been among the places where the country’s political battle lines are most clearly drawn. This was as true in the 1930s as it is now. As a center of industry, Ohio was hard hit by the Great Depression. Social and racial tensions were palpable. The large urban...
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At worst, Hemingway & Gellhorn is the best bad movie you'll see all year. It has two stars--Nicole Kidman and Clive Owens--at the top of their game and the chemistry between them incandesces. There’s a great supporting cast too: David Strathairn as the crushable John Dos Passos; Tony Shalhoub as Mikhail Koltsov, the Stalinist...
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When taught properly, the Spanish Civil War allows students in a Spanish class not only to learn about a major historical event but to think, write, and talk about political, moral, and cultural questions that are as relevant today as they were 75 years ago.
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Mike Nash, the director of New York University’s Tamiment Library, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives and ALBA board member, died unexpectedly on July 24. He was 66. A well known and accomplished archivist and historian, he came to NYU in 2002 from the Hagley Museum and Library, after working at Cornell University and the...
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