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 »
At Spanish Cinema Now, James van Maanen saw En el balcón vacío (Jomí García Ascot, 1961), a rarely shown film made by, and about, Spanish Civil War exiles in Mexico City:
A memory piece that shows us a grown women living in Mexico City who travels back to Spain to...
Read more »
Diana Hauk Payne, widow of ALB vet Perley B. Payne, passed away earlier this month. The San José Mercury has an obituary:
Perley had recently returned from the Spanish Civil War when they met at a political gathering. They married in 1939 and lived on a fruit ranch and raised...
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.
Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
Read more »
Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
Read more »
After the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, the Seegers family did not hesitate to join the resistance. They had experience fighting fascism: their son Piet had fought for the Spanish Republic. When Tom King started digging into his family history seventy years later, he fell from one surprise into the other.
Read more »
Tina Modotti’s short life took her from Italy to North Beach and from there to Mexico, Berlin, Moscow, and civil-war Spain. Rightly known as a pathbreaking modernist photographer, she was also a radical activist. “Modotti spent the second part of her working life fighting for revolution.”
Read more »
Kirsten Weld has spent years studying Latin American dictatorships and the citizens who fight to hold them accountable. That experience has proven valuable in her current role as president of the AAUP chapter at Harvard, which, in March, sued the federal government for targeting students and faculty—and won.
Read more »
Targeted by the far right, Rutgers historian Mark Bray and his family went into exile in October. Speaking with The Volunteer from Madrid, he reflects on the current political situation. “Fascism shamelessly takes over institutions that, under liberal norms, are supposed to remain neutral.”
Read more »
I. In the Beginning Second child, Bernard, born March 1, 1915 Older brother, my father, Jacob (Jack), born June 3, 1912 Younger sister, Roslyn, born (June 1, 1922) disabled, hospitalized, died February 10, 1942 Their father, Abraham, died March 21,1930 Their mother, Nettie, died April 29, 1953 Bernie Brilliant student, graduated High...
Read more »
The title of this new occasional feature of The Volunteer is the Esperanto word for “archive.” In it, we will present, translate, and contextualize iconic non-English language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain.
Read more »
In recent years, citizen groups in Leipzig and Madrid have fought to preserve the buildings that were backdrops in two of Robert Capa’s best-known photographs. Their steadfast dedication has created two sites of historical memory whose significance extends far beyond Capa’s original images.
Read more »
On November 8, 1937, Salaria Kea, a 26-year-old African American nurse from Ohio, had been in Spain for seven months and one day. The country was in disarray. Half its territory was controlled by fascist rebels. Cities were being bombed, and civilians were killed by the thousands. Thousands more were forcibly displaced. But Kea...
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