In dramatic news last month, Baltasar Garzón--the acclaimed Spanish lawyer and former judge who built his career on doggedly pursuing accountability for human rights crimes--agreed to head the legal defense team for Julian Assange in the Wikileaks publisher’s efforts to avoid extradition to the United States via Sweden.
If there is such a thing as...
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The civil war in Spain stands at a crossroads in Europe’s “dark twentieth century”: that is, in the story of how, not so long ago, the mass killing of civilians became the brutal medium through which European societies came to terms with structure-shattering forms of change. The Spanish conflict was all about this. But...
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This spring, Público, Spain's most prominent progressive media venue, killed its print edition, announcing massive layoffs. Almost immediately, a core group of its journalists got together to found MásPúblico, a truly independent, cooperative media project. Berta del Río has the inside story.
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Spain is among the countries hardest hit by the economic meltdown. But, much like in 1936, it is also Spain that is seeing some of the most inspiring reactions to the crisis. Amidst the ruins, revolutionary initiatives flourish: new and not-so-new forms of economic and political organization. Jorge Gaupp, who has been involved with...
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(Version in English.) Los rumores crecían y el fantasma del cierre inminente planeaba sobre el periódico Público después de que el día 3 de enero de este año los accionistas hiciesen pública la suspensión de pagos. Los trabajadores del diario nacional español empezaron a buscar alternativas ante la avalancha de malas noticias que se sucedían...
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(English version.) Para Antonio Gamsci, la crisis sistémica —orgánica, que decía él— consistía en “el hecho de que lo viejo no acaba de morir y lo nuevo no puede nacer”.(1) Sobre qué ocurre con “lo viejo” leemos algo en el periódico cada mañana y hablamos de ello con nuestros congéneres. Conversaciones que, en España,...
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Patience Darton’s life is an encapsulation of some of the 20th century’s most critical moments. Without an ounce of didacticism, her life shows the reader the abiding truth of “the personal is political.” No didacticism then, just a truth rendered with grace and melancholy (wrenching understatement is Patience’s forte) and delivered in a way...
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From Democracy Now: Protesters in Spain are celebrating a major victory after the country’s high court opened a criminal investigation into Rodrigo Rato, the former head of Spain’s biggest mortgage lender, Bankia. Rato, also the ex-chief of the International Monetary Fund, has been ordered to appear in court to face criminal fraud accusations related...
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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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Northern California is the fortunate home to two of the remaining Lincoln Brigade veterans: former newspaperman James Benét, now 98, and Delmer Berg, a very lively 96. Two of the four known living Lincolns today, Berg and Benét, each of whom lives a few hours drive from San Francisco, are mentally fit and living...
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Smith, Richard K. and R. Cargill Hall. Five Down, No Glory: Frank G. Tinker, Mercenary Ace in the Spanish Civil War. Naval Institute Press. Oct. 2011. 377 pp. illus. Timeline. Notes. index. ISBN 978-1-61251-054-5. $36.95. (Buy at Powells and support ALBA.) The reader will note from Five Down, No Glory’s introduction that this study...
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“I felt I was not reading history, I was helping to write it,” said one of the Bard College students who visited the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) on March 16. Our visit to the Archives took place during my course “Representations of the Spanish Civil War” and proved to be a memorable experience...
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Julian Bell: From Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War. By Peter Stansky and William Abrahams. Stanford University Press, 2012. (Buy at Powells and support ALBA.) In 1966, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams published Journey to the Frontier, which followed the lives of two young poets from families with strong intellectual and artistic backgrounds, both...
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I have always known about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. It was part of my family's proud heritage. My Aunt Toby Jensky was a nurse and administrator in the American Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy and worked at the Villa Paz Hospital and the Teruel front. My Uncle Phil Schachter was in a machine...
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I have always been intrigued by the men and women of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. They fought for the right reasons- stopping tyranny, and supporting a legally elected government and a fledgling democracy. After Tina died I played my DVD copy of "The Good Fight" and watched it again. From there I gathered inspiration...
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One of the last surviving veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Vernon Bown, died of pneumonia at a VA hospital in Martinez, California, on March 23, as reported by his son Ricardo. Born in rural Wisconsin, Bown went to Spain in 1937 and saw action with the MacKenzie-Papineau battalion until the volunteers were repatriated...
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La originalidad de la participación cubana en la Guerra de España reside en su importancia numérica en relación con la de los países hispanoamericanos, especialmente las islas antillanas de Puerto Rico y de la República Dominicana. En realidad, a la vista de las fuentes consultadas, fueron por lo menos 1.101.
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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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Now in its fifth year, ALBA’s educational program aims to reach high school teachers of social studies and Spanish who will use archival sources related to the Spanish Civil War in their classrooms. Three separate programs filled the calendar during the spring term; three more are expected in the fall. Last March, ALBA board...
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En inglés aquí. 1937. Una gira campestre en Toro Park, a 15 kilómetros de la ciudad de Monterey, California. Varios centenares de inmigrantes españoles que se han establecido en la Península de Monterey y en el Valle de Santa Clara disfrutan de un ameno “picnic”. Pero los puños en alto nos recuerdan que en...
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Names matter. Paul Preston’s choice of The Spanish Holocaust, his latest and most ambitious account of the massive violence unleashed in the wake of the 1936 coup, is as polemical as it is well-pondered. It reflects a conscious attempt on Preston’s part to reframe how we think about the war in Spain and its...
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My interest in Guatemala began when I was a student, when I learned that in 1954, the United States had engineered a coup against Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, and installed a military dictator, beginning cycles of destruction and repression. A small guerrilla army grew up in the 1960s to challenge this repressive and...
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Edited speeches by the recipients of the 2012 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism and the ALBA/Puffin Student Activist Award, presented at the Museum of the City of New York.
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The New Yorker, CNN, ProPublica, PRI, NPR, and EFE were among the media featuring this year's ALBA/Puffin Award winners. “How do you bring tolerance and democracy to a country in which a murderous military, which over the years killed some two hundred thousand of its own citizens, is...
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Judge Baltasar Garzón, winner of the 2011 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, sent a video message to congratulate this year's winners, while the Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI) was represented at the New York event by treasurer Isabel Pinar.
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ALBA’s annual celebrations in New York City and Berkeley, California (video; photos), commemorated the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica and honored the groundbreaking work of two tireless defenders of human rights in Latin America: Fredy Peccerelli, Executive Director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, and Kate Doyle, Senior Analyst of U.S. policy in Latin...
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Dear Editors, In the December issue, in an article on “Nick” Carter, the writer makes what seems to me some shameful and unwarranted remarks. He says Carter’s death fighting in the British International Brigade was “especially tragic because of what he might have become.” He then says Carter’s decision to enlist in the brigade...
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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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Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in Twenty-First Century America, by Michael Ratner and Margaret Ratner Kunstler. The New Press, 2011. (Buy.)
Somewhere lurking in our imaginations we carry a picture of ourselves responding to a rap at the door to be bullied by agents of the FBI. Fantasy is nurtured by films like...
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The Last to Fall, The Life and Letters of Ivor Hickman – an International Brigadier in Spain, by John L. Wainwright’s. Hatchet Green Publishing, 2012.
From the cover photograph, of the International Brigade volunteer’s weather-beaten face to the closing lines of "The Last to Fall, The Life and Letters of Ivor Hickman – an International Brigadier...
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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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
On Friday April 26, 2024, as part of my work with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Tribute Project I set out to visit the grave of Harry Farris in North Henrico, VA. I located the cemetery easily but my search for his grave proved a bit more complicated. I had the section he is buried...
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The Spanija series translates select autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google Translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and...
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With deep sadness, I write of the passing of Helene Susman, widow of Bill, at the age 103. She did not go to Spain with the Lincolns nor held a position with the VALB or ALBA, but to me and many others she was a founder of our small organization and a kindred spirit....
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The Spanija series translates select autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google Translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and places are...
Read more »
The Spanija series translates select autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google Translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and places are...
Read more »
The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
Read more »
The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
Read more »
The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
Read more »
The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
Read more »
The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
Read more »
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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