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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Today in the Chronicle, Bob Egelko reviews the ramifications of the WikiLeaks revelations regarding US pressure on foreign governments and judiciaries to block legal investigation of US officials, including the Guantánamo torture case opened by Baltasar Garzón:
The documents also quoted U.S. diplomats as urging Spain to transfer the case from Judge...
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ChristieBooks has just posted an English translation of Julián Casanova's op-ed in El País from last month, comparing Chile to Spain:
Pinochet learned a lot from Franco. ... The legacy of the crimes of the two dictatorships was tackled very differently in the two countries. In Spain, in the wake...
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According to today’s literary supplement of El País (Babelia), Jorge M. Reverte has published a new book in which he reconstructs the history of an important part of Francoist Spain’s support of Hitler and Nazism during World War II. The Spanish falangist José Luis Arrese proposed the name “División Azul” to refer to the...
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"Don't mess with Wisconsin," Christopher Hitchens tells his Vanity Fair readers this week, recalling the state's solid progressive tradition:
To make a stop in Madison, either as author or speaker or both, used to be no ordinary part of a radical tour. You bumped up against a tradition that went back a...
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Several years ago, when the Museum of the City of New York was gearing up for its show “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War,” we realized that while we knew a good deal about how some communities or groups in New York had responded to the outbreak of the war in...
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As the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, has announced an investigation of Qaddafi and his circle for possible crimes against humanity, El País reports that judge Baltasar Garzón, who has been working at the ICC since his suspension from Spain's criminal court last May, will serve as advisor...
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Calling for a no-fly zone over Libya, Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said in a speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva that "we should never forget Guernica," The Australian reports. "Guernica is known throughout the world for the bombing of the civilian population. We have seen evidence of that in Libya....
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This week's New York Times Magazine features an 8.300-word piece by Jennifer Egan on Lori Berenson, the US woman who served 15 years in a Peruvian prison for abetting a left-wing terrorist plot in Perú:
In 1980, when Lori was 11, three American nuns were murdered in El Salvador. “That stayed...
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An hour-long BBC radio program broadcast this past Sunday--with several new and many archival interviews, and the participation of Richard Baxell and Paul Preston-- can now be listened to online, here.
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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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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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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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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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