BlackPast.org is featuring vignettes of African American volunteers in Spain.
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Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
BlackPast.org is featuring vignettes of African American volunteers in Spain.
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La voz dormida, the best-selling novel by the late Dulce Chacón about women prisoners in post-Civil War Spain, is being made into a feature film by Benito Zambrano (Solas, Habana Blues), Variety reports; shooting starts this week, featuring Inma Cuesta and María León.
Budgeted at €4 million ($5.5 million),...
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In today's New York Times Book Review, Tara McKelvey reviews The Second Son, Jonathan Rabb’s final volume in a trilogy of historical thrillers, set during the Spanish Civil War:
Fascism and anarchy in 1930s Spain combine with romantic entanglement to provide the action ... The Second Son is an unusual blend...
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The Telegraph reports on one of the revelations in the new documentary about Baltasar Garzón, which is premiering at the Berlinale:
A British based neo-Nazi group allegedly plotted to assassinate one of Spain's leading judges over his attempt to investigate the crimes of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Members of...
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Manchester Confidential highlights the Working Class Movement Library:
There’s lots about the volunteers who went out from Manchester in the 1930s to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War – letters home, and the diary of Ralph Cantor from Cheetham Hill who died in Spain aged 21.
More here.
Herbert Sigüenza's one-man show A Weekend with Pablo Picasso opens in Houston this week, Chron reports:
The format is more Picasso just being Picasso - though he does look back at key incidents and works. He tells certain stories, as anyone would in conversation. He tells about his painting Guernica, how it...
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I recently stumbled across a WikiLeaks-like March 1945 letter by FDR to the new US Ambassador in Madrid, saying that the US government will hold its nose and maintain relations with the Franco regime, but that it repudiates the origins and ideology of the regime. Little did I know that this brief archival document...
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Matti Mattson's daughter Ilona and grandson Mischa inform us that a memorial celebration for Matti Mattson will be held on Friday, March 18, 2011, 5:00pm, King Juan Carlos I Center, NYU (55 Washington Square South, New York). No flowers please; contributions in Matti's memory can be sent to ALBA or Veterans for Peace.
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Today I visited NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, which is hosting (until March 26, 2011) a lovely exhibition titled “Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente.” I was accompanied by Julia Newman, former Executive Director of ALBA, who is also the creator of the film “Into the Fire: American Women and the Spanish Civil...
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"Expel the invader!" Posters contextualize events by inserting them into a series, into a narrative. In a subgroup of Republican Spanish Civil War posters, the struggle of the Republic against the forces of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini is likened to the popular resistance against the French invaders of 1808.
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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
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.
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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