Marlene Sidaway, President of the IBMT, writes with sad news:
It is with great sadness that the IBMT announces the death of Penny Feiwel (nee Phelps), the last surviving nurse from the Spanish Civil War. Penny was 101, and died in Bournemouth on the 6th January.
Penny was...
Read more »
Geoff Lawes is gathering information on current performances of songs from the Spanish Civil War. He writes:
I have begun a thread on the Mudcat Folksong Discussion site trying to collect a list of people who currently perform Spanish Civil War songs. It is hoped that it might encourage the singing of these songs...
Read more »
This week's The Nation features an extensive piece by Dan Kaufman on the Spanish Civil War photography exhibit at the International Center of Photography, "The Mexican Suitcase." The show's stunning, must-have, 2-volume catalog is now for sale at Powell's Bookstore. Purchasing it through this link helps support ALBA...
Read more »
Daniel Frontino Elash points out that Nate Thornton appears in the short documentary "Soviet San
Francisco," viewable here.
Read more »
Check out politicasdelamemoria.org for updates on events and publications by an important international group of scholars, including Francisco Ferrándiz and Francisco Etxeberria, who study Spanish historical memory, particularly the impact on contemporary Spain of the exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War.
Read more »
Ileana Gadea Rivas sends us "I am an International," a brief oral history based on conversations with Nate Thornton held in 2007 and 2008. Read the pdf here. The article was published in Spanish and English in Words and Silences/Palabras y Silencios: Journal of the International Oral History Association (vol. 5, number 1, November 2009), and...
Read more »
The Spanish Civil War film screenings in San Francisco later this month (see earlier post) will include With the Lincoln Brigade in Spain, the recently recovered twenty-minute film by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert Kline (clip here). More details will be posted soon.
The re-publication this month of my memoir, Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia & the Art of History (University of Georgia Press), may be of interest to those who wonder how and why I got involved in writing about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Spanish Civil War. I’ll be discussing this background on Thursday January...
Read more »
Georgia Wever writes with sad news:
Alasdair Fotheringham in today's Independent:
"Did my child die or was he kidnapped?" is something no parent should ever have to ask, and still less so when the kidnappers are the government. But that is exactly the question hundreds of Spanish families are currently demanding that their courts resolve for once...
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.
What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
Read more »
Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
Read more »
As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
Read more »
Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
Read more »
The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
Read more »
Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
Read more »
Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
Read more »
The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
Read more »
“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
Read more »
Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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