Marjorie Cohn, who gave ALBA's annual Susman lecture last month, calls for the US to stop bombing Libya:
There is no doubt that Muammar Qaddafi has been brutally repressing Libyans in order to maintain his power. But the purpose of the United Nations is to maintain international peace and security. The...
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Dear Friends: I wanted to let you know that there will be an Off Broadway production of "Triangle," an historical drama I've co-written with Sarasota based playwright Jack Gilhooley. 59 E. 59 Theaters will present the play as an Equity Showcase from April 14 through May 1. Amidst all the events surrounding the centennial...
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Irene Filip has just published a detailed essay on Dr. Hans Kaiser and his wife Dora, the two Austrian Jewish volunteers who helped run the International Brigade hospital at Benissa. Read the article, which has appeared in the yearbook of the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, here (in German).
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Visiting Chile, President Obama stopped short of offering an apology for the US role in the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in 1973, leading to the bloody military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet--an episode about which then Secretary of State Colin Powell said in 2003 "it is not a part of American history that...
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Alan Entin, nephew of Bernard "Butch" Entin, has been working with his local radio station on a documentary about his uncle: "Uncle Bernard and The Abraham Lincoln Brigade" in the series "Hidden Histories" (27 min, available in mp3 here). Also in Hidden Histories, three 2-minute segments on the Spanish Civil War with Jack...
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Ten days ago, at the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) in Geneva, Switzerland, the screening of Impunity, the new documentary by Juan José Lozano and Hollman Morris on the peace process in Colombia (website; trailer), Baltasar Garzón joined in a panel discussion on the question of impunity in relation to...
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Because of its altitude (10,000 feet above sea level), low humidity and minimal light pollution, Chile’s Atacama desert is the site of some of the world’s largest and most powerful telescopes. The observatories in the desert are privileged viewing and listening posts, where antennae and lenses can capture signals emitted from the most distant...
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The haunting strains of “El Cant dels Ocells” – a Catalonian folk song orchestrated by the great cellist and Spanish Civil War refugee Pau Casals—were the overture to the memorial service for Lincoln vet, Matti August Mattson, held yesterday, March 18, in the auditorium of NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center. The...
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Tiempo de Historia reports that a digital copy of the personal archive of José Díaz Ramos, secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party from 1932 to 1942, has just been donated to the Centro de Memoria Histórica in Salamanca:
La donación de este fondo para el Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica...
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This month marks the one-year anniversary of the online Volunteer and the ALBA blog. Some statistics: Total number of visits: 27,229. Total number of page views: 58,932. Unique visitors: 18,481, from 141 countries. Most read pages, posts and articles: ALBA Blog, Helen Graham, Cartier Bresson, Picasso and Delaprée, Oliver Law, Video,...
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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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Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
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Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
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“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
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The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
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The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
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From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
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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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New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.
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On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
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In 1944, Barsky wrote A Surgeon Goes to War, an 18-chapter memoir of his time in Spain, which was never published but can be consulted at NYU’s Tamiment Library. This is the first chapter.
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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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