"Judge Garzón is a personal hero," Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School writes on his blog today:
For civil libertarians, there are few heroes who can match Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish judge who ordered the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 and later worked to identify human...
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High-school and college teachers interested in bringing their classes to ALBA's annual celebration this coming Saturday May 14 in New York City may contact Marina Garde at mgarde@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398 for special group discounts.
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Preparations for ALBA's annual celebration in New York City this Saturday May 14 are entering the final stretch. Some tickets are still available for the lunch with ALBA-Puffin Human Rights awardee Baltasar Garzón and Prof. Jonathan Turley (12-2pm) and for the award ceremony--with music, speeches, and commemorations of the Lincoln vets we lost...
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Simon Leys reviews new editions of George Orwell's diaries and letters in the latest issue of the New York Review:
Blair’s personal life and Orwell’s public activity both reflected one powerfully single-minded personality. Blair-Orwell was made of one piece: a recurrent theme in the testimonies of all those who knew him at...
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The Guardian's Giles Tremlett explains the significance of the new national map identifying thousands of mass grave sites in Spain, which was published last week:
Presenting the results of almost four years of work, the interior minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, said: "No human being should be buried in a ditch." Not...
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The new film by Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields, The Mission) tells the story of Josémaría Escrivá, the founder of the militant secular order Opus Dei, whose members formed the institutional backbone of the Franco regime, is attracting a lot of media attention. This past week it has been reviewed--not very enthusiastically--in the
Our friends at the International Brigades Memorial Trust in the UK send along their latest newsletter featuring, among other things: news on the IB musical, "Goodbye Barcelona"; some interesting insights on Harry Potter & the Spanish Civil War; a review of Paul Preston's The Spanish Holocaust; a profile of Janet Vaughan, who...
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Gert Hoffmann, the Austrian International Brigader, will be turning 94 soon. He sends us the following note :
Reflecting on the anniversary of the end of the Second World War, I recall the hopes we had in that moment of great relief, of peace finally regained. But I wonder--I have wondered for decades--whether...
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The BBC commemorated the 74th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica last week with a radio program. Listen to the podcast here.
The president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, has announced that judge Baltasar Garzón--currently suspended from his post in Spain and working as special advisor to the International Criminal Court--may play an observer's role in the reform of the Ecuadorian judiciary, the Americas Society reports. Garzón visited the country last week. Ecuador is getting ready...
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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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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...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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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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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