Giles Tremlett, long-time correspondent in Madrid, is finishing a major new book on the 35,000 volunteers from all over the world who flocked to Spain to help defend the Second Spanish Republic against fascism.
Read more »
Edward Lewis, best known as the producer of Stanley Kubrik’s Spartacus (1960), passed away this week; he was 99. His life and work had several important connections to the Spanish Civil War. For Spartacus, Lewis hired screenwriter Dalton Trumbo who, along with Lincoln vet Alvah Bessie, was one of the “Hollywood Ten.” When Lewis demanded that Trumbo be credited publicly...
Read more »
Dear Friends, More than 50 New York City high school students, together with their history teachers, attended our annual event on May 5. It’s been a while since we had so many young faces in the audience. Along with some 150 other attendees, they saw the Immigration Justice Campaign receive the ALBA/Puffin Award for...
Read more »
Endorsing ALBA’s 2019 event in New York City this year, where the Immigration Justice Campaign will receive the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, is an Honorary Committee featuring world-renowned filmmakers, politicians, and activists. On May 5, ALBA and the Puffin Foundation will join in honoring and supporting the Immigration Justice Campaign (IJC)...
Read more »
In Digging the Spanish Earth, a veteran filmmaker pays tribute to Joris Ivens’s classic—while also revealing the curious circumstances under which Ivens made his film.
Read more »
Few people know that the infamous Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen was built by Spanish Republicans who were also its first inmates.
Read more »
Judith Montell and Connie Field’s 1990 documentary Forever Activists: Stories from the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was nominated for an Academy Award, is now available for streaming online, through Vimeo’s on-demand service, here.
Read more »
Spanish documentary makers Clemente Bernad and Carolina Martínez face up to two years in prison and a more than $13,000 fine for having filmed images in the crypt at the Monument for the Fallen in Pamplona, where a mass is celebrated every month in memory of Francoists, El País reports. Memory organizations such as the Association...
Read more »
The United States and World Fascism: Human Rights from the Spanish Civil War to Nuremberg and Beyond is the title of ALBA’s professional-development program for high school teachers in Social Studies, Spanish, Art, and Language Arts. Join us this Tuesday, November 6 at NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (53 Washington Square South, New...
Read more »
Issue number 48 (2-2018) of ¡No Pasarán!, the magazine published by the International Brigades Memorial Trust (IBMT), magazine is now online and viewable in full color, here. The issue features interviews with Geoffrey Servante, almost certainly the last British International Brigade veteran, and eminent Spanish Civil War historian Paul Preston. The next issue of the magazine...
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.
Adrian Pole’s sharp-eyed and sensitive new book notices what so many historians have missed about the International Brigades: that this army was filled with Spanish recruits. Interactions with everyday Spaniards made up a substantial chunk of foreign soldiers’ days in the rearguard. Due to the high mortality of Brigade units, maintaining fighting readiness demanded...
Read more »
Amirah Inglis’s (1926-2015) collection of photographs assembled for her research on Australians in the Spanish Civil War (1987) is posted on JSTOR’s website. The collection includes 119 images varying from pamphlet covers, post cards, to photographs of volunteers who supported the Spanish Republic at home, and of volunteers who went to Spain. Inglis planned...
Read more »
After attending the AABI event honoring the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Madrid, in February 2025, Anita Caref, a retired adult literacy educator, started an antifascist children’s book club.
Read more »
Ca-Vostra, a bar-hotel in the historic center of Ibiza Town that the Austrian painter Lene Schneider-Kainer opened in 1933, served for years as a refuge for artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazism—until she herself was forced into exile. Sol Izquierdo reconstructs a remarkable life.
Read more »
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, New York’s Volunteers In the spring semester of 2020, the first thirty-three students completed biographical sketches that were published to a student-built website. Stuyvesant High School teacher David Hanna declared his goal for students to compile biographical entries for each of the approximately 800 volunteers who went to Spain from...
Read more »
A new episode of the podcast “Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War” is now available. In the podcast, which premiered in October 2024, historians Patricia Schechter and Dan Czitrom discuss the impact of the Spanish war on their and others’ families. This episode features the children of Anna and Alvin Warren. Below is a...
Read more »
In 2025 the fourth stage of ALBA’s Passport Project wrapped up. The fourth stage focused on volunteers on whom we have very little information to enable a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) search. Most of the volunteers submitted had at least a year of birth to reference. Expectations...
Read more »
On the fiftieth anniversary of Franco’s death, the New York Times published an article by Jason Horowitz about the “nostalgia” for Francisco Franco being expressed by a growing number of younger Spaniards, most of whom have no direct experience of the dictator. As is common these days in the Times’ coverage of any number...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
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