New Hampshire's NH Outlook will dedicate part of its weekly program this Thursday to the Lincoln Brigade. More here. Once broadcast, the program can be viewed on demand here.
Read more »
Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
New Hampshire's NH Outlook will dedicate part of its weekly program this Thursday to the Lincoln Brigade. More here. Once broadcast, the program can be viewed on demand here.
Read more »
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:
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.
Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
Read more »
Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
Read more »
Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
Read more »
The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
Read more »
China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
Read more »
The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
Read more »
Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
Read more »
Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
Read more »
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 »
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