The U.S. government urged its Spanish counterpart in the spring of 2009 to stymie the investigation into torture and war crimes at Guantánamo initiated by judge Baltasar Garzón under the principle of universal jurisdiction, El País reports (see also The Guardian).
Read more »
In addition to the collections at UC San Diego and the Digital Library of Catalonia highlighted before, the U.S. Library of Congress has a collection of about 120 posters of the Spanish Civil War. Access it here.
Read more »
Mitchel Cohen talks with John Gerassi, son of Spanish Civil War veterans and author of The Premature Antifascists: North American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (1986) and, most recently, Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates:
Gerassi was writing for the NY Times in 1962 and later Newsweek...
Read more »
Dora Birnbach was born on Septmber 20, 1911 to a Jewish orthodox family in the town of Sokolov, Poland. She entered Spain on a small fishing boat with a doctor from Bulgaria, nurses from Poland and Romania, a former Canadian priest who brought money donated by Canadian workers for the Republic and a young...
Read more »
Peter Glazer's Radical Nostalgia: Spanish Civil War Commemoration in America (Rochester, 2005) has been reissued in paperback, just in time for the holiday season:
Radical Nostalgia asks and answers important questions about the meaning of memory and the politics of history. Peter Glazer's warm, empathetic, and insightful study of ceremonies...
Read more »
Europeana, the central digital repository for Europe's cultural heritage, features some 150 items related to the Spanish Civil War, including videos, posters, and photographs from the collections of the Imperial War Museum (UK), Televisió Catalana, and the Scottish Life Archive.
Read more »
Franco died on November 20th, 1975, and for almost thirty-five years following his death, his followers and sympathizers--including Falangists and other neofascists--gathered at his tomb in the Valley of the Fallen to pay him tribute. This year the Spanish government ordered their access to the tomb blocked, Público reports, officially for security...
Read more »
Richard Schickel reviews Jonathan Miles' The Dangerous Otto Katz: The Many Lives of a Soviet Spy for the Los Angeles Times:
He had at least 21 aliases. He insisted that he was briefly Marlene Dietrich's husband in 1920s Berlin, which was probably not so, though he was possibly...
Read more »
Sir Geoffrey Cox, the New Zealand journalist who covered the Spanish Civil War (see, among other places, Paul Preston's We Saw Spain Die, reviewed here), is featured this week at New Zealand History Online.
Read more »
Agence France-Presse has come out with a piece on the ten-year anniversary of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory:
Over the past 10 years, the association has opened some 150 mass graves and exhumed around 1,500 corpses in its quest for truth, which is emerging just as slowly,...
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