Here is an impassioned speech about the imperiled IB monument in Madrid by Almudena Cros of the Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI). The video was taken this past July 6 at the annual commemoration in London:
Read more »
We have just received the sad news that Toshi Seeger, Pete Seeger’s wife, passed away on July 9. Mark Moss at singout.org writes: She was a mother, an organizer, an activist and filmmaker … and an essential part of all of her husband’s work. She was 91. As much as Pete is a consummate...
Read more »
This week the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas–which houses one of the largest humanities collections in the world–announced the acquisition of the papers of Barbara Probst Solomon (b. 1928), a long-time friend and ally of the Spanish Republic and the Lincoln Brigade. The collection includes manuscripts, correspondence, published books, first drafts, interviews, documentaries and...
Read more »
Our friends at the IBMT have posted Paul Preston's lecture on George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, read at the Len Crome Memorial event by IBMT secretary Jim Jump (Preston himself was unable to attend). See the video below or on YouTube. Marshall Mateer provides some useful context for a U.S. audience:
Morecambe...
Read more »
The annual commemoration in honor of the International Brigades was held in London on July 6. See a slideshow here, courtesy of photographer Guy Smallman and the IBMT. More pictures, courtesy of Almudena Cros of the Asociación de los Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI), on Facebook here.
Read more »
(Versión en inglés.) Nueva York, 3 de julio de 2013 - Los Archivos de la Brigada Abraham Lincoln (ALBA) se convierten en la primera organización de Estados Unidos en unirse a la Plataforma por la Comisión de la Verdad sobre los Crímenes del...
Read more »
(Versión en castellano.) On July 3 the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) became the first organization from the United States to join the Plataforma por la Comisión de la Verdad sobre los Crímenes del Franquismo (Platform for a Truth Commission on the Crimes of Francoism). As ALBA is entrusted to sustain and preserve the legacy...
Read more »
Dublin IBMT member Luke O’Riordan has posted a 1971 Irish TV programme (watch here) on his late grandfather, Irish International Brigader Michael O’Riordan (12 November 1917- 18 May 2006), a veteran of the 1938 Battle of the Ebro, whose 75th anniversary is being marked this year. Luke has also posted a recording of his recently...
Read more »
Chela Scott Weber, associate head of the Tamiment Library, which houses the ALBA collection, writes in the NYU Libraries newsletter on a new donation, The Joseph North and Helen Oken North Papers: The North Papers span the 1910s through the 1960s, most of them from 1930 to 1960. Joseph North was a journalist who covered...
Read more »
Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! gets the latest news on Edward Snowden from Michael Ratner, an attorney to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, member of ALBA's Honorary Board, and president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional RightsRead 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