An interview with Abe Osheroff. Video here.
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Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
An interview with Abe Osheroff. Video here.
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From the January 15th issue of the Times:
GOLDSTEIN--Maynard, 2 December 1913-12 January 2011. On October 16, 2010, Maynard Goldstein--the last surviving veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought at Jarama--spoke at a benefit event for the Archives of the Vets. He spoke passionately, bringing to life the streets of New York in...
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With thanks to James D. and Andrés Fernández, ALBA is proud to present its own YouTube channel, featuring more than a dozen new clips, including this interview with Milt Wolff, made for the 2007 exhibit Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War.
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President Obama has finally received his long-promised gift. The January 1937 portrait by Catalan photographer Agustí Centelles of a young Afro-Cuban volunteer who had headed for Spain from New York, where he was living as a political exile, has made it to the White House, Catalan Television reports. Centelles' sons, who had originally...
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The English-language edition of El País reports on the publication of a new Atlas of the Civil War in Catalonia, featuring 400 maps with detailed information on the events of 1936-39:
Everything is documented with military precision, down to the road networks, the railroad lines and the cities' street names. Where does all this...
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This month's Socialist WebZine pays tribute to Milt Wolff, the last commander of the Lincoln Battalion:
Mr. Wolff also battled fiercely for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. He even offered the services of the aging veterans of the Lincoln Brigade to the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, who...
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More sad news: we've just learned that Maynard Goldstein passed away earlier this week, joining Matti Mattson and Nate Thornton in the group of veterans we have lost this year. Maynard published a memoir, "Baseball in España," in a recent issue of the Volunteer. He also spoke eloquently at the October 16th "Songs...
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Matti Mattson, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, died while in hospice at JFK Hospital Atlantis, Florida, on January 11, 2011.
Mattson was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. He completed one year of high school and then studied at the B.F. Brown Junior High School, where he took an elective course in printing. He then worked...
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Arts & Letters Daily just picked up Dan Kaufman's long piece in the Nation on the Spanish Civil War photography (the "Mexican Suitcase") on display at the International Center of Photography. (Earlier coverage here; pdf here.) The show’s stunning, must-have, 2-volume catalog is now for sale at...
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Renowned Lorca scholar Christopher Maurer--editor of the poet's Collected Poems--was doing research in the music division of the Library of Congress when he came across a manuscript of one of the poems of Poet in New York, including a set of previously unknown verses. The Guardian has the goods:
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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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