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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Fugitive from Spanish Fascism. A Memoir. By Miguel Domínguez Soler. Translated and with an Introduction by Richard Baker. Cornerstone Press, 2010. Miguel Domínguez Soler, a young Spanish Socialist worker, committed to republican and democratic ideals, had to flee his hometown of Huelva at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, after the...
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On July 18, 1936, at the age of 22, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) traveled to Barcelona, on assignment for the British magazine Life and Letters Today, to report on the People’s Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular). An anti-fascist alternative to Hitler’s Berlin Olympics, the popular games were canceled when the outbreak of the Spanish...
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What inspired Picasso to paint his Guernica? The great cultural tradition that links Picasso with artists like Goya has always been the High Road towards the masterpiece. But exploring the Low Road of newspapers, pamphlets and street posters can also provide surprisingly rich pickings, allowing us to reconstruct a street view of Picasso...
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As we begin the fifth year of ALBA’s teaching programs for high school instructors, we are detecting positive patterns in the anonymous evaluations each teacher is asked to complete at the end of the program. Last December in Chicago, for example, a male world history teacher indicated that he had begun the session with...
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ALBA's 76th annual celebration (tickets here) will focus on civilian victims of armed conflict, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica (which took place on April 26, 1937) and the struggle for Human Rights in Latin America and elsewhere. ALBA's annual New York event will take place...
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Two winners share the honors of this year’s ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, splitting $100,000 to continue their fight for justice in Latin America. (Read the full press release here. En castellano; order tickets here). Both Fredy Peccerelli, Executive Director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, and Kate Doyle, Senior Analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America...
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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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Grace Under Pressure: The Life of Evan Shipman. By Sean O’Rourke. Harwood Publishing and Unlimited Publishing, 2011. “I owe Spain a great deal,” Evan Shipman wrote to his good friend Ernest Hemingway on his return from Spain in June 1938. Shipman’s road to war followed a unique path that was influenced by the novelist. He...
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Quaker Relief Work in the Spanish Civil War. By Farah Mendlesohn. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. During the Spanish Civil War, in the face of the enormous civilian suffering, a number of non-governmental international organizations stepped in to perform relief work. Many of these supported one side of the conflict or the other;...
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Al servicio de la República. Diplomáticos y guerra civil. Edited by Ángel Viñas. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2010. Diplomats are funny creatures. On the one hand, they embody an anachronistic kind of superficiality—all form, protocol, and etiquette. On the other, they are influential actors behind the scenes, no less devious or powerful than spies and...
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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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Fanny Schoonheyt, the tall, blond “queen of the machine gun,” was the only Dutch woman to join in the battle action during the Spanish Civil War. Her life is shrouded in mystery. Could she have been the only female foreign official in the Republican Army? What was her involvement in the events of May...
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Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929-1939, due to be published next month with the University of Wisconsin Press (excerpt, order), reveals scores of unknown facts about the life and work of Luis Buñuel during a crucial decade not only in the filmmaker’s life but in the history of film and photography—as well...
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