Daniel Frontino Elash points out that Nate Thornton appears in the short documentary "Soviet San
Francisco," viewable here.
Read more »
Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
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 »
This past Wednesday, Margot Adler covered the Spanish Civil War photography exhibit for NPR's Morning Edition:
What's fascinating at the exhibit is that you can look at scores of tiny prints on contact sheets, frame by frame and then see what finally appears in photo news magazines like Look, or in...
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.
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...
Read more »
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!
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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.”
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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 »
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