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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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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