This is the story of my service in the Spanish Civil War during the years 1937 and 1938 as a soldier in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the 15th Brigade of the International Brigades.
Read more »
This is the story of my service in the Spanish Civil War during the years 1937 and 1938 as a soldier in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the 15th Brigade of the International Brigades.
Read more »
Jonah Rubin is a young scholar working on his PhD thesis in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. If all goes well, in a couple of years, his work, tentatively titled “‘All of Spain is One Big Mass Grave’: Death, Memory, and Democracy Seventy-Five Years After the Spanish Civil War” will take its place...
Read more »
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of three articles about the work of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), a grassroots Spanish organization helping the victims of Francoism in their pursuit of truth, justice and reparations. Click here for the second and third. In early January, El...
Read more »
David Lethbridge's new biography covering Dr. Norman Bethune's participation in the Spanish Civil War, Norman Bethune in Spain: Commitment, Crisis, and Conspiracy, published by Sussex Academic Press, is now available for pre-ordering.
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
We just received the sad news that Harry Wayland Randall, one of the last surviving veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, passed away last night at a care facility in Snowflake, Arizona. Harry was a Sergeant in Mac-Paps battalion and Chief Photographer of the Photographic Unit of the 15th International Brigade. His unit’s work is...
Read more »
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...
Read more »