For three years, the French and German International Brigade Associations, respectively A.C.E.R. and K.S.F.R., have pushed for the creation of an international umbrella committee whose role would be to link the many national IB associations. The most recent meeting for the future “Coordination Internationale” took place in Paris last May. Delegations, principally from Europe,...
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The 74th annual Bay Area reunion of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, held in Berkeley, California, on May 30, paid tribute to the legal work of Judge Baltasar Garzón in challenging decades of silence about mass murders conducted during the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. The program, part of...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and the Puffin Foundation are thrilled to announce a major new initiative: the Puffin/ALBA Human Rights Project (HRP), established to honor all those who fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War by connecting that legacy with international activist causes today, in particular the defense of human rights.
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After twenty-six years in Barcelona, one of the world’s most prominent historians of twentieth-century Spain has moved back to the United States. Few foreign scholars command the respect and authority that Gabriel Jackson enjoys in Spain. For the past decade, Jackson has been working on a major biography of Juan Negrín, the Republic’s Prime...
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The morning of the publishing of the Saville Enquiry Report, June 15th 2010, I received an early call, from Elaine Brotherton, a close friend and niece of William McKinney, who was one of the thirteen men who shot dead by the British Army on January 30th 1972. The event became known to the world...
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Tomorrow evening I’ll join with / many others for a meeting of the / Revolutionary Poets Brigade. / The Brigade exists because you / fought in Spain, Nate Thornton.
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Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham. Introduction by Nick Tosches. New York Review of Books/paperback. On his way out of Spain in 1938, Bill Gresham, a Baltimore-born volunteer in the John Brown Artillery company of the International Brigades, heard a strange story from one of his comrades, Joseph “Doc” Halliday, about an alcoholic carnival...
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El tema de la Guerra Civil Española en Argentina siempre ha sido una cuestión llamativa, y sigue permaneciendo en la memoria colectiva como uno de los acontecimientos populares y solidarios más importantes de nuestro país. Pero para la mayoría de los casos sólo se recuerda la solidaridad desde lo humanitario, y la ayuda material....
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To the Editor: Friends of ALBA will be pleased to know that there is a new monument to a member of the International Brigades in Spain. The monument, to the Irish brigadista Charlie Donnelly, was dedicated in February 2010, on the 72nd anniversary of his death in the Battle of Jarama. Charlie Donnelly was...
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Antonio Celada, Manuel González and Daniel Pastor respond to the Volunteer's review of their book Los Internacionales. Eduardo Corrales sends a greeting.
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John Murra (1916-2006) claimed he made up his mind to go to Spain in 20 minutes. “A recruiter asked me to go, I’d never been to Spain. It was a place I was interested in.” In February 1937, Murra put his plans to do graduate work in sociology on hold and set...
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Isabelle Rohr, The Spanish Right and the Jews, 1898-1945: Anti-Semitism and Opportunism, Brighton/Portland Sussex University Press, 2008. This is an intriguing study of the relationship mostly of the Spanish Right, but also until the post-Franco years, of the Spanish state itself, with its own Jews, so to speak, the Sephardic community. It hearkens back...
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The University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights has chosen two students to receive human rights awards in honor of Lincoln vet Abe Osheroff and his wife Gunnel Clark. This year’s winners are graduate students Erin Murphy and Peter Morris, each of whom will receive $750 toward their international human rights...
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Oliver Law, the first Black American to command white troops in battle, was appointed on July 5, 1937 as commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. According to eyewitness accounts of men under his command, Law died a hero’s death leading a charge against Francoist forces on Mosquito Hill at the Battle of Brunete on...
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In a stirring Memorial Day afternoon of speakers, songs, and socializing, the San Francisco Bay Area friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade paid homage to the living history of the vets and honored the work of Spain’s Judge Baltasar Garzón who has aroused political passions by advocating the recovery of historical memory, specifically unearthing...
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An audience of almost five hundred saw Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! receive the ALBA Activist Award at the 74th reunion of the Volunteers for Liberty, held on May 2 at the Museo del Barrio in New York City. In an impassioned half-hour address (video), Goodman talked about the importance of an independent,...
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This past July, around the 73rd anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War and 11 days after the opening of a large Robert Capa exhibit at the Catalan National Museum of Art, the Barcelona news paper El Periódico de Catalunya published what was billed as a stun ning revelation: Capa’s legendary photograph of...
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NYC’s 74th Reunion of the Volunteers of Liberty Lincoln Brigade’s “Legacy of Activism” Award to Honor Amy Goodman, acclaimed broadcast journalist, host of Democracy Now! May 2, 4:30 pm Museo del Barrio, 104th Street and 5th Avenue Order tickets online at www.alba-valb.org by clicking on “NEW YORK REUNION 2010” For information, write info@alba-valb.org or...
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Carl Geiser, a key political leader in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and author of a pioneering book, Prisoners of the Good Fight, died November 28 in Corvallis, Oregon.
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Charlie Fors was a Detroit automobile worker who volunteered to go to Spain to join the International Brigades. He had volunteered to drive a truck when it was told to the volunteers that there were trucks available, but no drivers for them. He was assigned to drive a truck on the Cordoba front, Pozo...
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La Batalla Del Jarama, by Jesús González de Miguel, and Los Internacionales: English Speaking Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, edited by Antonio R. Celada, Manuel González de la Aleja, and Daniel Pastor García.
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Max Aub was a novelist and playwright of remarkable originality who spent his live chronicling the conflict that had torn his country apart and catapulted him into exile. Almost forty years after his death, Verso has published Field of Honour, the first of Aub's 6-volume Civil War cycle.
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The Madrid-based Flamenco group Noche Flamenca celebrated its 16th season in New York with a a riveting, emotional tribute to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. “ALBA” begins with a passionate lament expressed by two guitars and two male voices, Manuel Gago (tenor) and Miguel Rosendo (baritone). The dancers enter the low-lit stage led by...
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A year ago, film researcher Juan Salas made the startling discovery that a 16mm print of documentary footage in the ALBA Collection of the Tamiment Library was the long lost film made by Henri Cartier-Bresson during the Spanish Civil War, titled With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain. The discovery prompted the decision to...
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In late summer 1937, former editor of the journal New Theater, Herbert Kline, traveled to Spain with French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and cameraman Jacques Lemare to shoot a documentary about the sanitary services of the American Medical Bureau, an organization created in the United States to aid...
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Who is the young black International Brigadier in doughboy gear whose portrait the Spanish government hopes to give to Barack Obama? In November the Spanish press put out a worldwide call for help in identifying the man on this stunning photo by Agustí Centelles. It was a challenge we could not pass up....
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On a Sunday evening in January Helen Graham, one of the most prominent English-speaking historians of twentieth-century Spain today, sat down to discuss her life-long fascination with the war, Spain’s attempts at “recovering” its historical memory, and the skewed way in which the war is still viewed by many U.S. scholars and intellectuals.
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After holding successful week-long institutes for high-school teachers in New York City and Tampa, Florida, last year, ALBA is proud to announce its first institute in the Midwest, entitled “Ohio and the Spanish Civil War.” Co-sponsored by the Ohio Humanities Council, Oberlin College, and the Puffin Foundation, this interdisciplinary institute will allow 20 Ohio...
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Matti Mattson received a standing ovation after addressing the graduates of Fitchburg State College in his hometown in Massachusetts on January 29, 2010. College President Robert V. Antonucci presented the President’s Medal to the veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade before more than 200 new graduates, family, and community. The attentive audience heard Mattson recall...
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To the Editor: I was a member of a delegation, headed by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, that went to Spain early in 1964 to act as observers at the trial of the Carabanchel Ten, who had been arrested and were later convicted for trying to organize unions in Franco Spain.
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