he seventieth anniversary of the death of Republican President Manuel Azaña, who passed away on November 3rd, 1940, in France, prompts Público's Diego Barcala to reconsider his legacy. The Spaniards' collective memory of Azaña, he writes, remains strangely similar to the image of Azaña engineered by the Franco regime. Meanwhile, the conservative...
Read more »
Andrea Thompson loves Manuel de Lope's The Wrong Blood, whose story opens just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War:
This absorbing novel — the first from the distinguished Spanish author to be translated into English — is full of mild sensations.... While the uncovering of secrets provides the...
Read more »
The tour for friends and family of the Lincoln Vets, organized by Alan Warren, started three days ago. Follow their adventures on the blog:
Our last stop was to the Brigade cookhouse below the monument. This was close to where Frank Ryan and Jock Cunningham rallied the demoralised Brigaders on...
Read more »
Len Tsou just shared his images with us:
Read more »
The Spanish Civil War and the defeat of the Republic, immediately followed by the outbreak of World War II, pushed hundreds of thousands of Republicans into exile. But the diaspora was not limited to people: archives, too, were dispersed (hence the "Mexican Suitcase")--and so were works of art. Picasso's monumental painting Guernica, the...
Read more »
In response to the brief presented last week outlining the third case against Judge Baltasar Garzón, this one related to alleged irregularities in Garzón's order for a wiretap of Valencian politicians involved in a corruption scandal (the subject of a recent editorial in El País), Garzón declared through his defense attorney that...
Read more »
"The State fails to comply with international law in order to protect privileges that generated during the dictatorship of which some Spanish social elites still take advantage," said Emilio Silva, the founder of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), in a chat session with readers of Público today. "The financial support for...
Read more »
Today's El País Emilio Silva writes a combative op-ed to mark the 10-year anniversary of the day that volunteers began digging in Priaranza del Bierzo to look for the remains of his grandfather, executed during the Spanish Civil War. Soon after, Silva founded the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica:
The Edinburgh Anarchists have been kind enough to post a review essay on Scots volunteers in Spain, published last year by Stuart Christie (of Christie Books, which this blog has featured before) in the Scottish Review of Books:
A new and fascinating contribution to Scotland’s role in...
Read more »
Gail Dolgin, the associate producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary Forever Activists: Stories of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, directed by ALBA board member Judy Montell, has died, the Oakland Tribune reports:
Dolgin was a longtime board member of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, a proposal reviewer for...
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.
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 »
The first thirty-six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Phase IV were submitted December 30, 2024. Phase IV is intended to focus on volunteers on whom we have minimal information. At some point in the future, I plan to resubmit some volunteers who were returned as not found or on whom no information...
Read more »
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 »
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