The past months have been a time of loss for the International Brigade community. Harry Randall, Adolphe Low, Jim Benét, David Lomon, and Albert Hirschman left us, as did Sylvia Thompson, widow of Lincoln Brigade and Second World War veteran Bob Thompson (1915-1965) and Dr. Moisès Broggi, the Catalan physician who headed up the...
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...
Read more »
After organizing three successful professional development programs for high school teachers this spring—in Seattle, Tampa, and Oberlin, Ohio—ALBA launched three more in the autumn term in Alameda County, California, New York City, and Bergen County, New Jersey. As in the past, teachers are welcoming...
Read more »
ALBA’s George Watt Memorial Essay Prizes are awarded each year to a graduate student and an undergraduate student who have written an outstanding essay or thesis chapter about any aspect of the Spanish Civil War, the...
Read more »
In the latter half of the 1930s, 1,700 Canadians journeyed to Spain to defend the elected republic against General Francisco Franco’s military revolt. Decades later, as these men...
Read more »
U.S. newspaper coverage of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade reveals the domestic and foreign policy debates that arose in the late 1930s and continued into the late 1950s. I...
Read more »
“There is not a single one among the conservative or neo-Francoist historians who does not manipulate or skew the historical evidence. They sell bold-faced lies. This sounds harsh, I know. But I have proven it time and again. In Spain, the myths propagated by Francoism have survived, conveniently freshened up, and are mobilized in...
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...
Read more »
You’re all feet waiting / to do the saranda / tonight / hair-free and shoulders / swaying, laughing / because tomorrow you’ll / have to carry a column / of trays / of sardines on your head
Read more »
The economic crisis in Spain, which many thought short-lived, appears to have no end in sight. Everyone has a story—a narrative of the crisis that points to some responsible...
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:...
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...
Read more »
How much does Spain’s 15-M movement owe to past political struggles? The protests that broke out on May 15, 2011 reveal an interesting convergence of the old and the...
Read more »
Is there a military family of the Spanish Civil War, and of the International Brigades in particular? Until November 11, 2012, I had never asked myself, or anyone else,...
Read more »
We know, of course, that he gave his talent as a writer to support the Republican side.
But there are at least two additional things Hemingway did that have attracted...
Read more »
The War and its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century, by Helen Graham, Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2012. 250 pp.
Many subjects thread through the pages...
Read more »
Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War (Eugene, Ore.: Resource Publications, 2012), by Laurie E. Levinger. The story of a young Jewish-American Socialist from...
Read more »
The Last English Revolutionary: Tom Wintringham, 1898-1949 (Brighton, Portland, Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), by Hugh Purcell with Phyll Smith.
A very welcome “enlarged, revised and updated edition” of the...
Read more »
Our friends from the UK write: We are sad to report the sudden death of David Lomon, the last known survivor in Britain of the more than 2,500 volunteers...
Read more »
We just received the sad news that Jim Benét, journalist and veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, passed away this weekend in Santa Rosa, California. This past August he...
Read more »
Harry W. Randall, Jr., once the chief photographer of the special photographic unit of the Fifteenth Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, died at a care facility in Snowflake,...
Read more »
Sad news from Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study: Albert Hirschman, German-born brilliant scholar and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, passed away at the age of 97. From the...
Read more »
Victor Grossman in Berlin writes to report sad news: the death, earlier this month, of German IB veteran Adolphe Low, who was granted French citizenship in 1945 and remained...
Read more »
Dr. Moisès Broggi i Vallès, who passed away at age 104 on the last day of the year, was a renowned Catalan surgeon who during the Civil War headed up...
Read more »
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
Please find attached photos of my visits to the graves of Lester Rowlson and Tersil Obriot last weekend. I left a brigade flag and a fresh white rose at each. ,,, I was also proud to include aspects of my Clapton CFC scarf; you might have heard of this small football club in London that...
Read more »
Peter Verbergh translated this article from CeSoir describing the arrest of the Dallet-Nelson Group. “The Interrogation of the Passengers of the Sans-Pareil”, CeSoir, March 29, 1937 (From our Special Correspondent) Perpignan March 28 (By Telephone) Yesterday morning around 10am, The Coast Guard Vessel Cebère docked in the port of Port-Vendres alongside the torpedo boat...
Read more »
Only five veterans of the Spanish Civil War are known to be buried in Virginia outside of Arlington National Cemetery: two in Richmond, two in Norfolk, and one in Big Stone Gap. ALB Tribute visited the graves of Harry Edward Farris and Thomas Moore in Richmond as well as Manuel Lizarrago and Crawford Morgan...
Read more »
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
Search the Database