The Morning Star has published two items on Sam Lesser, the British IB vet and chairman of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, who passed away last week: a brief notice and an obituary by Roger Bagley:
The Daily Worker also sent Lesser to Cuba as the world held its...
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Alan Warren, who is organizing a two-week tour around "The Memories and Places of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade" in Spain later this month, has launched a blog to record the group's experiences. See here for an itinerary.
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"I have to say no to all sorts of good people ..." Pete Seeger, who will be playing at a Puffin-hosted ALBA benefit event in two weeks (order tickets here, press release here), describes his Sunday routine for the Times' Michael Wilson:
It’s almost a bad joke in...
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Jeff McAleer reviews "Popular Front," a new board game developed by Numbskull set during the Spanish Civil War:
Popular Front recreates this conflict in 90-minute strategy game form, leading players to compete against their ideological counterparts not only for military positioning, but for political victory. Players must be...
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Ángel Gurría Quintana reviews The Wrong Blood, Manuel de Lope's newly translated Spanish Civil War novel, for the Financial Times:
The Wrong Blood ... is set in the Basque country, near the French border, in what one character calls “the most eccentric corner of Spain”. ... The greatest...
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How to "create a new historiography of an event that has been saddled with oblivion, repression, ideological baggage, and, now, personal reminiscence"? Ruth MacKay writes in the latest issues of the History Workshop Journal on the Spanish Civil War as a challenge for historians, covering recent developments and polemics:
today something...
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Marjorie Baumgarten sees the award-winning new film at FantasticFest:
Amid an epic love story, the film also functions as a parable about the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, themes that are practically a subgenre of the Spanish cinema. Beginning in 1937, the film opens with a preamble...
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An article and television report by Stephanie Simon for New York 1 (2-min. video can be viewed here):
"We opened up the boxes, you know, didn't know what to expect. And in fact, there were about 165 rolls of nitrate film, which is highly flammable and combustible. But there...
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Iskra1916 reports on the commemoration of Socialist Spanish Civil War volunteers from Belfast:
the Republican Socialist ex-prisoners group, Teach Na Failte and the Lower Castlereagh Community Development Group, in conjunction with the Consensus Programme, met today for a tour of
"Activist judges like Garzón, Andreu, and Pedraz have created a big diplomatic headache for the Zapatero government." An overview of this past two years' developments at Project Censored: Media Democracy in Action:
In October 2009, under great pressure from the United States, the government of Spain decided to limit its own...
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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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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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From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
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Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
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New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.
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On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
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In 1944, Barsky wrote A Surgeon Goes to War, an 18-chapter memoir of his time in Spain, which was never published but can be consulted at NYU’s Tamiment Library. This is the first chapter.
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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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