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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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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Behind the lines during the Spanish Civil War, nearly two hundred thousand men and women were murdered extra-judicially or executed after flimsy legal process. They were killed as a result of the military coup of 17-18 July 1936 against the Second Republic. For the same reason, at least three hundred thousand men...
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Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, members of ALBA, representatives of the Puffin Foundation, authorities, amigas y amigos:
Seventy-five years ago in my country, Spain, one of the darkest and saddest chapters in the history of humanity began. It lasted more than forty years and even today, after 34 years of democracy, it has not...
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Spain in/and the United States Screening and discussion of two documentaries about Spaniards in the US. NYU’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese and its King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, together with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and the Comisión de Archivos de La Nacional, are pleased to present filmmaker Luis Argeo, who...
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Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis, the pair of Catalan documentary filmmakers that brought us Les fosses del silenci (The Spanish Holocaust, view part 1- part 2), Els nens perduts del franquisme (The Lost Children of Francoism, part 1 - part 2), and Memòria per llei (Memory by Law, view) returned last month...
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Martin David Maki wrote many letters in Finnish when he was in Spain with the International Brigade. The letters were recently discovered, and thanks to Matti Mattson, the only man who could translate them because he knows both Finnish and the war, we have them now. Martin’s own handwritten story shows that he was...
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Miguel Domínguez Soler was a talented man of humble origin who lived during tumultuous times, survived many brushes with death, and left a memoir based on the diaries he kept his entire life. He was born on March 1, 1910, in Ayamonte, Spain, across the River Guadiana from Portugal. In 1930, one year before...
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Although Picasso experts agree that the painter’s interest in the war as a subject was sparked some time in late 1936 or early 1937, the precise circumstances of the “conversion” that made the Guernica possible were never fully made clear—until now, that is. Last year, while preparing an edition of the Spanish Civil War...
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In 1940, Francisco Franco, using the pseudonym Jaime de Andrade, authored a treatment for a screenplay, titled “Raza : Story lines for a film script.” The following year, the script was made into a feature-length film, produced by the government. The original text and the 1941 film are invaluable documents, as they offer us...
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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
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The family of Paul Andrew Mooney (1910-1961) is searching for documentation to substantiate information he provided to his family about serving in the International Brigades. Paul Mooney was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Hughes High School in 1929 and attended the University of Cincinnati in 1929, 1935 and 1936. In...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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The first thirty-six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Phase IV were submitted December 30, 2024. Phase IV is intended to focus on volunteers on whom we have minimal information. At some point in the future, I plan to resubmit some volunteers who were returned as not found or on whom no information...
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My grandfather (Nana), Suresh, moved to the United States in 1959 as a young man on a student visa pursuing his master’s degree. His parents, my great grandparents, sought value in being ‘foreign educated’ and bringing his education home – to Mumbai, India to run their family business. 2 years after my Nana moved...
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Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80. Born in New York City in 1943 to a secular Jewish family, Peter grew up in the Bronx and Queens, where his father worked as a composer,...
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LA RÉPUBLIQUE -QUOTIDINEN DE COMBAT RADICAL ET SOCIALISTE, February 5, 1938 Foreign Volunteer Arrested On March 27 last, 29 North Americans were arrested on board the boat Sans-Pareil while they were attempting to reach the Spanish Coast. They were sentenced to a prison term for violating the decree of February 18, 1937 on the...
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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...
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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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Peter Verburgh’s translation from the French Newpaper Le Journal about a group of 29 Americans arrested in France. “29 American Volunteers Arrested in Muret” Le Journal, 5 April 1937 Toulouse, 4 April- The Control services of the Non-Intervention Committee do not remain inactive, especially with the help of the French Police and Gendarmerie. Thus...
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ALBA Board Member Steve Birnbaum made the trek on Memorial Day to the Home of Eternity Cemetary in Oakland, California to pay tribute to ALB veteran Hans Joachim. Joachim was born in Berlin, Germany in 1906 and moved to the US in 1924. He served in Spain with the George Washington Battalion and later...
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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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