James D. Fernández was interviewed on Spanish national radio about his exhibit on Spanish immigrants in New York, which has already attracted a lot of media attention. (October 13; listen here.) Sebastiaan Faber was interviewed on Radio Círculo Bellas Artes (Madrid) about Spanish historians' role in the debates about historical memory. (October 18;...
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After a six-month delay, the Spanish Supreme Court has finally removed Falange Española--Spain's fascist party--from the case in which Garzón is being charged with overstepping his judicial boundaries when he initiated an investigation of crimes against humanity committed during the Civil War and under the Franco regime. The fascists were one of the two...
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In an editorial today, El País calls attention to the "strange paralysis" that seems to have befallen the third of the cases brought against Judge Baltasar Garzón: a charge of illegal wiretapping in his investigation of corruption in the Valencian branch of the opposition party, the Partido Popular. El País questions...
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Ten years after founding the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), Emilio Silva estimates that there are still more than 1,800 mass graves to exhume in Spain, El País reports. The Spanish government will soon publish an online map detailing their exact locations. Since 2006, a year before the approval of...
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On Saturday, October 16th, Pete Seeger, Patti Smith, and Guy Davis performed at an unforgettable fundraising event for ALBA, "Songs for the Cause: Music, Education, and Activism," sponsored by the Puffin Foundation and hosted at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY). (See photos by Alan Entin here.)...
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In a press release coinciding with the twelfth anniversary of Judge Garzón's request for detention of Augusto Pinochet (1998) and the second anniversary of his brief (auto) opening an investigation into Francoist crimes against humanity, the Spanish section of Amnesty International has decried Spain's increasingly lackluster record in the fight against impunity,...
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The Brazilian Bar Association (Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil) has launched a solidarity campaign on behalf of the embattled Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who has been suspended from his duties at Spain's National Criminal Court in the wake of his attempt to open an investigations of crimes against humanity committed during the Civil...
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The Spanish Senate approved a proposal to enforce the Law of Historical Memory by converting the Valley of the Fallen monument into a site which will recognize the victims of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship, reports Natalia Junquera, for El País .
The progressive coalition, Entesa Catalana del Progrès, (made up of...
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Spanish Supreme Court Justice Manuel Marchena, who is prosecuting Judge Baltasar Garzón for alleged irregularities related to courses taught at New York University in a program cosponsored by some Spanish banks and corporations, has himself frequently given talks and classes paid for by some 25 different corporate sponsorships, Público reveals. Moreover, neither Marchena...
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Robert Llopis sends along the program for the Fifth Tribute Week to the International Brigades, which will be celebrated in Benissa (País Valencià) from October 29 to November 7, 2010.
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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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