The Volunteer, February 1974 He was one of my oldest friends. We knew each other long before Spain in the street of Brownsville. If there was one thing that characterized him, it was his zest for life. He would sing on picket lines, while we dragged furniture back for evicted neighbors. On Friday morning,...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, V. 1, No. 25, December 6, 1937. You asked him why he came to Spain, how he came to hate fascism. You ask because his background is Mississippi and Texas, where reaction is strong in the ruling class. His folks were planters in Mississippi. If you trace the family you...
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The Volunteer for Liberty V.2, No. 30, August 26, 1938 For the Lincolns it was action from the very start. Even before we crossed the Ebro we were under enemy fire and what’s more important, the enemy was under our fire. I don’t mean only the artillery fire that was sweeping the approaches to...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, V2, no. 33, October 6, 1938 All was not exactly quiet on the British Battalion’s sector during the last action of Hill 565. This despite the fact that the Battalion was theoretically in reserve, in accordance with the accepted reserve police of the Division, the Army Corps and the Army....
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The Volunteer for Liberty, V2, No. 30, August 26, 1938 Copernico is alive! Throughout the Brigade there are those who knew and it follows, admired him, who will be overjoyed to hear it. We knew he was captured (during the March retreat) and almost certainly felt that he was killed. Now we have...
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Originally published in The Volunteer for Liberty, V2, No. 33, October 6, 1938 Deep in a natural cave at the head of a baranco is the command post of our Brigade. Here, at one time, peasants had utilized the natural shelter, filled its mouth with masonry and constructed a home. The cavern is partitioned...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, V2, No. 31, September 5, 1938. It was a great game. The Mac-Paps put up a swell battle and lost gamely. (It isn’t too much out of the way to say they took it sort of hard, so why not...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, V2, no. 33, October 6, 1938 ARAGON BALLAD Francisco Franco, fascist chief, Of him is the story told, His “justice” fills the Aragon hills, His curse is manifold: He’s taken toll of the North and South The gore it reached far; And they tell the tale of his “charity”...
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Endorsing ALBA’s 2019 event in New York City this year, where the Immigration Justice Campaign will receive the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, is an Honorary Committee featuring world-renowned filmmakers, politicians, and activists. On May 5, ALBA and the Puffin Foundation will join in honoring and supporting the Immigration Justice Campaign (IJC)...
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The City College of New York (CCNY) was founded in1847 as the Free Academy of the City of New York. Offering free tuition, the school served as a combination prep school, high school and college. It was renamed the College of the City of New York in 1866 and became the City College of...
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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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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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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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