The Lincoln Brigade
The Lincoln Brigade

Author: William Loren Katz

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2013-05-15

Total Pages: 105

ISBN-13: 1620329018

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THE LINCOLN BRIGADE The day after Christmas in 1936, a group of ninety-six Americans sailed from New York to help Spain defend its democratic government against fascism. Ultimately, twenty-eight hundred United States volunteers reached Spain to become the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Few Lincolns had any military training. More than half were seriously wounded or died in battle. Most Lincolns were activists and idealists who had worked with and demonstrated for the homeless and unemployed during the Great Depression. They were poets and blue-collar workers, professors and students, seamen and journalists, lawyers and painters, Christians and Jews, blacks and whites. The Brigade was the first fully integrated United States army, and Oliver Law, an African American from Texas, was an early Lincoln commander. William Loren Katz and the late Marc Crawford twice traveled with the Brigade to Spain in the 1980s, interviewed surviving Lincolns on old battlefields, and obtained never-before-published documents and photographs for this book.

Comrades and Commissars
Comrades and Commissars

Author: Cecil D. Eby

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0271029102

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In the summer of 1936, Generalissimo Francisco Franco led a group of right-wing nationalists in a military attack on the Republican government of Spain&—the start of what would become the Spanish Civil War. Despite U.S. laws banning participation in foreign conflicts, American volunteers began pouring into Barcelona in January 1937. The most famous of these anti-Franco groups was the band of 2,800 American fighters who called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. In Comrades and Commissars, Cecil D. Eby pushes beyond the bias that has dominated study of the Lincoln Battalion and gets to the very heart of the American experience in Spain. Controversy has plagued the Lincoln Battalion from the very start. Were these men selfless defenders of liberty or un-American Communists? Eby has long been regarded as one of the few balanced interpreters of their history. His 1969 book, Between the Bullet and the Lie, won accolades for its rigorous and fair treatment of the Battalion. Comrades and Commissars builds upon that earlier study, incorporating a wealth of information collected over intervening decades. New oral histories, previously untranslated memoirs, and newly declassified official documents all lend even greater authority and perspective to Eby&’s account. Most significant is Eby&’s use of Lincoln Battalion archives sequestered in a Moscow storeroom for sixty years. These papers draw renewed focus on some of the most provocative questions surrounding the Battalion, including the extent to which Americans were persecuted&—and even executed&—by the brigade commissariat. The Americans who served in the Lincoln Battalion were neither mythic figures nor political abstractions. Poorly trained and equipped, they committed themselves to back-to-the-wall defense of the doomed Spanish Republic. In Comrades and Commissars, we at last have the authoritative account of their experiences.

Madrid 1937
Madrid 1937

Author: Cary Nelson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-02-04

Total Pages: 535

ISBN-13: 1136666311

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Few topics in 20th century history generate as much interest as the Spanish Civil War. These letter from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade take us back to a time when 2800 Americans took up arms and confronted Hitler's Condor Legion, Mussolini's Black Shirts, and Franco's fascist calvary on the battlefields of Spain. Here are their combat experiences, the love letters they wrote under fire, friendships formed among themselves and with their Spanish comrades, and reports of Madrid and Barcelona undergoing history's first saturation bombing of civilian targets. It was the eve of World War II, and these men and women saw first-hand the danger facing the world. Iadrid 1937 captures for the first time the thoughts, words and dreams of those who fought. More than a collection of separate letters, Madrid 1937 gathers letters from many hands to tell a group story. Richly illustrated with over 50 color and black and white plates, this chronicle enables the reader to travel with the volunteers through France and Spain; visit the beseiged city of Madrid and walk the streets of Barcelona under fascist bombardment; experience the chaos of battle and the excitement of celebrations behind the lines; stand beside nurses and doctors as they struggle to save the lives of the wounded; and encounter famous writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Langston Hughes. Madrid 1937 tells a story of epic proportion, the struggle of a volunteer army who chose to risk their lives in the struggle against Fascism.

The International Brigades
The International Brigades

Author: Giles Tremlett

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 721

ISBN-13: 1408854007

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** Shortlisted for the Military History Matters Book of the Year Award ** 'Magnificent. Narrative history at its vivid and compelling best' Fergal Keane The first major history of the International Brigades: a tale of blood, ideals and tragedy in the fight against fascism. The Spanish Civil War was the first armed battle in the fight against fascism, and a rallying cry for a generation. Over 35,000 volunteers from sixty-one countries around the world came to defend democracy against the troops of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. Ill-equipped and disorderly, yet fuelled by a shared sense of purpose and potential glory, these disparate groups of idealistic young men and women formed a volunteer army of a size and type unseen since the Crusades, known as the International Brigades. Were they heroes or fools? Saints or bloodthirsty adventurers? And what exactly did they achieve? In this magisterial history, Giles Tremlett tells – for the first time – the story of the Spanish Civil War through the experiences of this remarkable group. Drawing on the Brigades' archives in Moscow, as well as first-hand accounts, The International Brigades captures all the human drama of a historic mission to halt fascist expansion in Europe.

Mississippi to Madrid
Mississippi to Madrid

Author: James Yates

Publisher: Open Hand Publishing, LLC

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780940880207

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From his birth to a sharecropper family in the cotton fields of Mississippi to the unrest in Chicago and New York during the Depression, James Yates' experience with labor protest and union organizing shaped his vision of freedom and led to his decision to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.

Facing Fascism
Facing Fascism

Author: Peter N. Carroll

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2007-03

Total Pages: 123

ISBN-13: 0814716814

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When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, loosely affiliated groups of writers, artists, and other politically aware individuals emerged in New York City to give voice to anti-fascist sentiment by supporting the Spanish Republic. Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War examines the participation of New Yorkers in the political struggles and armed conflict that many historians consider a critical precursor to World War II. Nearly half of the 2,800 Americans who volunteered to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against Generalissimo Francisco Franco came from the New York area. Fundraising, propaganda, and deployment for anti-fascists everywhere in America were orchestrated through New York City. At the same time, powerful voices in New York expressed sympathy for the pro-fascist side. The fighting in Spain brought to the surface the complex ideological and ethnic identities always present in New York politics. Facing Fascism examines the full range of this experience, including that of the New Yorkers who supported Franco. It addresses the role of doctors, nurses, and social workers who left New York hospitals to provide assistance to the defenders of the Spanish Republic, as well as those who remained active on the home front. The book also describes the involvement of students in the war, the key role of writers and the media, and the contributions made by members of New York's art and theater communities. Facing Fascism also serves as the catalog to an exhibition of the same name appearing at the Museum of the City of New York in the spring of 2007. The book and exhibition both make use of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives' extensive holdings, which range from historical documents to video recordings of oral histories. Numerous other libraries, archives, museums, and private collectors have also been consulted to make this the most complete exhibition of its kind ever mounted. The exhibition will also appear in Spain.

The Lincoln Battalion
The Lincoln Battalion

Author: Edwin Rolfe

Publisher:

Published: 2013-10

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9781494092894

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This is a new release of the original 1939 edition.

American Commander in Spain
American Commander in Spain

Author: Marion Merriman

Publisher: University of Nevada Press

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781948908740

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The Spanish Civil War (1936—1939) was a confrontation between supporters of Spain's democratically elected Republic—including peasants, communists, union workers, and anarchists—and an alliance of nationalist Army rebels and upper-class forces, including the Catholic Church and landlords, led by General Francisco Franco. In the political climate of the time, this civil war became the focus of foreign interests advocating conflicting ideas of democracy and fascism. Spain became a training ground where Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy tested military techniques intended for use in a yet to be declared wider world war. Although most Western nations embraced a neutrality pact, individual volunteers from around the world, including the United States, made their way to Spain to support the Republican cause. Among the Americans was Robert Hale Merriman, a scholar who had been studying international economics in Europe. He and his wife, Marion, joined volunteers from fifty-four countries in International Brigades. Merriman became the first commander of the Americans; Abraham Lincoln Battalion and a leader among the International Brigades. Now available in a new paperback edition, American Commander in Spain is based on Merriman and Marion's diaries and personal correspondence, Marion's own service at his side in Spain, as well as Warren Lerude's extensive research and interviews with people who knew Merriman and Marion, government records, and contemporary news reports. This critically acclaimed work is both the biography of a remarkable man who combined his idealism with life-risking action to fight fascism threatening Europe and Marion's vivid first-hand account of life in Spain during the civil war that became a prologue to the Second World War.

The Anti-Warrior
The Anti-Warrior

Author: Milt Felsen

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9781587290619

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In 1937 thirty-six nervous young men dressed in ill-fitting blue suits, wearing berets, and carrying identical black valises, were given tickets for an American Export Lines ship. They were told to conduct themselves as ordinary tourists, to be "inconspicuous." They were volunteers for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, traveling the French underground to join in the fight against Franco. Among them was Milt Felsen, a young New Yorker and radical antiwar activist on the University of Iowa campus who had decided that fascism had to be opposed. Some of these young men never made it to their destination. But Milt Felsen did, beginning a march across the Pyrenees which was only the first of his many battles and adventures. Told with uncommon wit and verve, this memoir of war and resistance is a stirring account of Felsen's involvement in two decades of battle. Surprisingly, this is a spirited and even funny book, infused with Felsen's unbeatable personality. After the Spanish Civil War, Felsen helped form the O.S.S. in World War II. Taken prisoner of war, he escaped in his inimitable style during a 1,200-mile prisoner-of-war march and drove out of Nazi Germany in a Mercedes-Benz. He returned to the United States more convinced than ever of war's insanity and its extreme human cost