Spain's national criminal court, the Audiencia Nacional, has decided that the case for alleged torture perpetrated at the Guantánamo prison can go ahead. Judge Baltasar Garzón opened it in 2009, despite the resistance of the Attorney General and--as the WikiLeaks cables revealed--strong pressure from the US government and Congress. The case is conducted by...
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Marci Rubin, daughter of Lincoln Veteran Henry Mortimer “Hank” Rubin reports that her father passed away this morning in San Francisco.
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The thousands of documents, images and artifacts that make up the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives can mean different things to different people. To the veterans and their immediate friends and family, the Archives are, among other things, a repository of the personal papers and effects of loved ones, a kind of extended and collective...
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Spain's Supreme Court, El País reports, has rejected a request for annulment from the family of one of Spain's most renowned 20th-century poets, Miguel Hernández, who died in a Francoist prison in 1942, at age 31, after having been convicted of "aiding the rebellion"'--the perverse phrase with which Franco's Law of Political Responsibilities designated...
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Paul Preston's forthcoming book The Spanish Holocaust, an exhaustive study of violence and repression during and after the Spanish Civil War, has just been awarded the prestigious Premio de Historia de Catalunya Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal, Público reports. The book will go on sale in Spain this coming April; the English edition will...
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Agustí Villaronga's Pa negre (Black Bread) came out as clear winner in this week's Goya award ceremony (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars). The Catalan film is part of the line-up of the Portland International Film Festival this month. The Hollywood Reporter writes:
Agusti Villaronga's Black Bread won...
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The Courier reports:
Dundee volunteers who travelled to Spain over 70 years ago to fight fascism were commemorated on Saturday. The annual remembrance, organised by the Trades Union Council, was held at the memorial to the International Brigade in Albert Square. Taking part in the event along with union members were relatives...
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The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, together with the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights, has filed two submissions with the successor of Baltasar Garzón at Spain's Audiencia Nacional, who is investigating the accountability of US officials responsible for torture at Guantánamo Bay and other detention sites:
The first...
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Why did George W. Bush not go to Switzerland last week? Xavier Rauscher at International Jurist has the answer: He did not want to end up like Augusto Pinochet. As Geoff Pingree and I wrote in The Nation last May, the pioneering efforts of the Spanish judge "have ensured, for example, that Donald Rumsfeld...
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Opening statement from the US Department of State, from the publication “The Spanish Government and the Axis,” a collection of the wartime correspondence between Franco, Hitler and Mussolini which was discovered in Germany in 1945: THE GOVERNMENTS of France, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America have exchanged views with regard to...
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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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