Last year, when Sebastiaan Faber and I tried to identify the black IBer portrayed in a picture by the great photographer Centelles, we came across a great many documents that would help a patient historian tell the relatively unknown story of the US-based volunteers from Spain and from Spanish-speaking America who joined...
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ALBA and Veterans for Peace are proud to announce the Annual ALBA Bill Susman Lecture by Marjorie Cohn, editor of The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse (NYU Press, 2011), past president of the National Lawyers Guild, professor of law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, and author of three other books (see www.marjoriecohn.com): "Human...
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Alan Warren writes: Last week I was examining letters written by Welsh Brigader Alwyn Skinner in the Richard Burton archives at Swansea University. I made a note of one passage written on August 14th 1937 when Alwyn was based at Tarazona de la Mancha. He writes the following:
One night this week...
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AFP reports:
Spain's attorney general's office on Tuesday rejected a demand that it open a national probe into allegations that newborn babies were stolen from their mothers and sold to other families for decades under a policy approved by Franco's dictatorship. ... "The attorney general's office refused to open an inquiry at...
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The memorial for Nate Thornton, Veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who died on January 2, 2011 will take place on Sunday, March 6 at 2:00 pm
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Donna Brennan and Arya F. Jenkins, of AllReel Media, have kindly shared a 10-minute video compilation of "Songs for the Cause," the benefit concert held this past October 16 at the Museum of the City of New York, with Pete Seeger, Patti Smith, and Guy Davis. The compilation includes selections of the speeches given by...
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In its on-going coverage of the State Department cables made available by Wikileaks, El País has published a report from the US ambassador in Santiago sent after the death in 2006 of dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose heading made a tongue-in-cheek reference to Chevy Chase's famous running gag on Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update...
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The ALBA website features several full-fledged thematic introductions and lesson plans, such as this unit on Jewish volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, prepared by Peter N. Carroll, Fraser M. Ottanelli and Rajel Ibañes Sperber:
Jewish men and women accounted for over one fourth of all international volunteers and played a prominent...
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The AP's Daniel Woolls reports:
A Spanish association of people searching for lost children or parents filed a petition Thursday with the attorney general to investigate allegations that newborns were stolen from their mothers and sold to other families for decades, including as recently as the mid-1990s. The petition was signed by around...
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Pascale Bonnefoy reports for the NY Times:
A Chilean judge has opened the first official investigation into the death of former President Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Socialist who died during the 1973 military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Mr. Allende, 65,...
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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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On May 3, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice Community received the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism at a ceremony in New York City. Executive Director Audrey Sasson delivered the following acceptance speech.
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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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