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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
About a third of the 2,800 volunteers who left from the United States to help defend the Spanish Republic died in Spain. Of the survivors, many went on to fight fascism during World War II in the U.S. Armed Forces. An extensive selection of their letters home was published in 2006 as The...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
“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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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
Search the Database