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...
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The Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI) has been gathering photographs of International Brigade monuments worldwide, from London, Amsterdam, and San Francisco to Belfast, Seattle, and Stockholm. Click here for an overview; send information on any missing monuments to the AABI at aabi@brigadasinternacionales.org
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Spanish postage stamp from 1937 celebrating Spain/US relations.
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Two images of political strife in Little Spain (West 14th St) during the Spanish Civil War.
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Tomorrow, Thursday Jan. 27th, ALBA's Peter N. Carroll will present the second set of Spanish Civil War screenings at the San Franciso Museum of Modern Art, including Le Retour (Cartier-Bresson, 1944-45, 33 min), The Spanish Earth (Ivens, 1937, 52 min), and Guernica (Resnais/Hessens, 1950, 13 min). Phyllis Wattis Theater, 7:00 p.m. Made at the end of...
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Jim Jump writes with sad news:
I’m sorry to have to report that Jack Edwards, veteran of the battles of Jarama, Teruel and the Ebro and a cheerful and loyal friend to many people in the IBMT, died this morning (26 January 2011) in hospital in Telford at the age of...
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As the war in Spain dragged on, divisions among the Spaniards in New York became more and more pronounced. The pro-Republican paper “Frente Popular” regularly “outed” the city’s Spaniards who were pro-Franco or insufficiently pro-Republic. “Figures of the Spanish Colony of NY, who, because they are fascists are in part responsible for the horrible...
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The Colombian government is contemplating the hire of Baltasar Garzón as Human Rights advisor as it sets up a process for transitional justice, ABC and Público report. The Judge has been suspended from his post at the National Criminal Court pending three cases against him at the Supreme Court. Last week,...
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s many of you know, the photo exhibition which I curated, "La colonia: A photo album of Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898 - 1945," has been up at NYU's King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center since September. I'm delighted to announce that the show has been held over until May.
The show...
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Lito B. Zulueta at the Philippine Daily Inquirer visits the touring exhibit on foreign correspondents covering the Spanish Civil War, currently on display at the Instituto Cervantes in Manila:
the war was above all a propaganda war, or a war of dispatches, waged by Spanish and foreign correspondents who harbored within...
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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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