The conflict in Libya has stirred up memories of, and analogies with, the Spanish Civil War. Earlier this month, Australian foreign minister Kevin Rudd warned of aerial bombing campaigns, stating that "we should never forget Guernica." Later, Tony Karon in Time magazine considered to what extent 2011 Libya is comparable to 1936 Spain:
The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has just uploaded a 105-minute video recording of a visit by Lincoln vet Lou Gordon to the Spanish class of Professor Noël Valis (now at Yale). Watch the video here.
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At the presentation yesterday of The Power of Reason, the book and DVD based on his interview with novelist Manuel Rivas and Isabel Coixet's prize-winning documentary Listening to Judge Garzón, Baltasar Garzón said he fully expects to lose his trials in front of the Spanish Supreme Court. But, he added, "I have never moved...
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At the memorial gathering on March 6 in honor of Lincoln vet Nate Thornton, who passed away on January 2, poet and playwrite Angelina Llongueras read her poem in tribute of him:
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Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis write in Common Dreams on the case of Bradley Manning--the army intelligence office who allegedly leaked tens of thousands of State Department cables to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, exposing cover-ups of potential war crimes and other irregularities:
The lesson is clear, and soldiers take note: You're better off...
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Anna Grau, New York correspondent to the Spanish newspaper ABC, has just published a moving tribute to Maynard Goldstein, the last surviving Lincoln veteran to fight in the battle of Jarama, who passed away in January:
It was inhumanely cold in New York some weeks ago when I went out into the...
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The Club Julio A. Mella in Spanish Harlem was named after the founder of Cuba’s Communist party. The exhibition “Nueva York: 1613 – 1945” (New-York Historical Society and Museo del Barrio), featured the original of this painting of that club by Henry Glintenkamp, as part of the exhibition’s final section. In this closing sequence...
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After a decade of research, Prof. Paul Preston at the London School of Economics has just finished writing The Spanish Holocaust, which tallies, narrates, and explains the tremendous cost in human lives and suffering of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. The book, which has already won a prize, will be out...
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As I mentioned in an earlier post, the curators of the museum show “Nueva York: 1613 – 1945” (New-York Historical Society, Museo del Barrio) used the Spanish Civil War in New York as a kind of provisional endpoint for the exhibition’s sweeping narrative about Spanish-speakers in Gotham. The exhibition showed how the war brought...
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Goodbye Barcelona, a musical by Karl Lewkowicz and Judith Johnson about the International Brigades, is scheduled to open for a four-week run in London in November. A fund-raising reading of songs from the show was held in London on Friday 4 March; speakers included historian Paul Preston, novelist Victoria Hislop and Lola Ruiz...
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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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