Agence France-Presse has come out with a piece on the ten-year anniversary of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory:
Over the past 10 years, the association has opened some 150 mass graves and exhumed around 1,500 corpses in its quest for truth, which is emerging just as slowly,...
Read more »
Bethune Imagined, a play based on the life of Norman Bethune, the Canadian physician whose innovations in blood transfusion techniques during the Spanish Civil War were documented in the film Heart of Spain (Herbert Kline, 1937), has opened to mixed reviews:
When the world remembers Canadian icon Norman Bethune, it...
Read more »
Patti Smith, who last month performed in an ALBA benefit event alongside Pete Seeger and Guy Davis, has won the National Book Award with her memoir Just Kids, the BBC reports.
Read more »
The author of the acclaimed SCW novel Winter in Madrid (reviewed earlier in The Volunteer) speaks with The Guardian's Sarah Crown:
for Sansom, the novel was, and is, a personal endeavour. Studying the period, he was "appalled – by the way the Spanish people were treated by Franco's fascists, the...
Read more »
The Halifax Evening Courier reports that the memorial plaque commemorating Ralph Fox, who died in late 1936 fighting in the International Brigades, has been moved. More here.
Read more »
Público today featured the Spanish Civil War Memory Project developed by Luis Martín-Cabrera at the University of California, San Diego, which for the past three years has been collecting and making available online interviews with those who experienced the Civil War and Francoist repression (catalog of videos here). Among the project's...
Read more »
A long piece by Alasdair Fotheringham in today's Independent:
Today, 71 years after the Spanish civil war ended, 35 years after Franco's death, and four years after a law was passed authorising exhumation of the war's mass graves, barely 10 per cent of the estimated 2,052 sites have been...
Read more »
Complementing the well-known collection of Spanish Civil War posters at the University of California, San Diego, and ALBA's own online posters, the University of Barcelona's Memòria Digital de Catalunya, a vast online repository, contains the digital images of more than 1,100 posters and pamphlets of the Spanish Civil War. Click...
Read more »
In a curious game of judicial ping-pong, a Madrid judge has sent an important case back to the National Criminal Court, specifically to the department that was led by Judge Baltasar Garzón before his controversial suspension, and which is now headed by Judge Pablo Ruz, El País reports. The case, which involves the...
Read more »
Today's El País features a five-minute video about the work of Emilio Silva and others, who over the past decade have been working on the "recovery of historical memory." Tomorrow El País will be publishing a larger piece to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of Silva's Association (ARMH). Click here for a
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.
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 »
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 »
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