Stacey Guill, writing in the Hemingway Review, revisits Joris Ivens' pathbreaking documentary The Spanish Earth:
Ivens acknowledged the "artistic" or creative element to Hemingway's contributions during this period, recalling that Hemingway helped with "the general strategy of the film. He showed a quick comprehension and understanding of the documentary film...
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GREX, a research group at the Université de Paris Ouest-Nanterre, is looking for texts and testimonies from former members of the International Brigades who passed through the French and North-African internment camps between 1939 and 1944, with the idea of compiling an exhaustive inventory of camp testimonies. See the group's work in progress here.
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Jeffrey R. Ryan, a history teacher from Massachusetts, has just published A Volcano Heard Afar (Dorrance Publishing Co.), a novel whose protagonist is a US volunteer in Spain who, upon his return, becomes a victim of McCarthyism.
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The Center for Constitutional Rights reports:
two leading human rights groups filed papers urging a Spanish judge to open a criminal investigation into the role of former Bush administration officials, including torture memo authors John Yoo and Jay Bybee, for their part in creating a legal framework...
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"Obama decided long ago to turn the page on the abuses and illegalities of the Bush administration," the Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights states in a Huffington Post column on the revelations about US pressure on Spain's judiciary in relation to torture investigations;
The U.S. was particularly...
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The Telegraph reports:
The Palace of El Pardo, an old royal residence set in hunting grounds on the northeastern outskirts of Madrid, served as el Caudillo's home following his victory in the Spanish Civil War until his death in 1975. But guided tours around the palace will no longer include...
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At a massive celebration of the International Human Rights Day, with performances by Sting and others, Baltasar Garzón received the Azucena Villaflor award--named after one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo--from Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. See BBC coverage here, and footage here and here.
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Lee Kutnick, former secretary of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, passed away two weeks ago. From an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Lee worked tirelessly as a community and union organizer, devoting her life to making the world a better place for working people. She was Secretary...
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Robert Llopis reports on the inauguration of the "Parc Dels Internacionals," dedicated to the International Brigades, at Benissa this past October 30th as part of the Homage to the IB, in the presence of a representative of the City of Benissa, Irene Filip from the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (Archive of the Austrian Resistance,...
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Gert Hoffman writes with sad news:
This is to announce that Josef "Joschi" Eisenbauer, one of the three surviving Austrian brigadistas died on December 10. He was one of the more than 1400 Austrians who had gone to defend the Spanish Republic. He went to Spain in 1937, was a member of the XIIIth and XIth International Brigades, was wounded and taken to...
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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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