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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
Today, the day Spain commemorates its conquest of Latin America (Día de la Hispanidad), known as Columbus Day in the U.S., the Spanish Minister of Justice spoke on Spanish national public television to defend the research going on at the Valley of the Fallen, and denied that any mass graves are being...
Read more »
The renowned, boundary-pushing Brossa String Quartet (Brossa Quartet de Corda) has just released a new CD with songs from the International Brigades, including "Si me quieres escribir," "Los cuatro generales," "Viva la Quince Brigada," and "Tango del Camp d'Argelers." The album can be bought here. See here for a video of...
Read more »
Next week the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, ARMH), founded and led by Emilio Silva, will be celebrating the tenth anniversary of its first exhumation of a mass grave, which took place on October 23-24, 2000 in Priaranza del Bierzo (León), Público
Yesterday the Telediario of Spanish national television covered La Colonia: Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898-1945,a photography exhibit curated by ALBA Board member James D. Fernández, and co-sponsored by ALBA. The segment can be viewed here(beginning at the 01:01:18 mark.) The show has already received a good amount of coverage in the Spanish media. More video interviews here.
Read more »
The Spanish Civil War Memory Project of the University of California at San Diego--whose library hosts one of the world's largest collections on the subject--has posted a first video with an introduction and victims' testimonies (in Spanish).
Read more »
Photographer Peter Marshall pays tribute to the recently deceased SCW vet.
Read more »
EITB reports:
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.
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
“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...
Read more »
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.
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