Among the buzz-generating new films at the San Sebastián festival last week was the Catalan film Pa negre (Black Bread), by Agustí Villaronga (1953), set right after the Civil War. Indiewire reports:
“Bread” has one of the most jaw-dropping prologues in recent memory, in which a horse-drawn cart is pushed off...
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El País's Sunday magazine published a large spread on the Mexican Suitcase yesterday. Read it here.
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Herman Scheerboom, the last living Dutch veteran of the Spanish Civil War, passed away in the second week of September. Born in 1912, he was wounded at Teruel in January 1938 (shot in the head), and captured at Villalba. When he was finally freed in 1943, he immediately joined the fight against the Nazis,...
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With one unprecedented dissenting vote, the Spanish Supreme Court has rejected a second appeal filed by the defense of Judge Baltasar Garzón, who is being tried for allegedly overstepping his judicial boundaries when he opened a case to investigate crimes against humanity committed under Franco's rule, in October 2008. Público reports that...
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In the New York Times, which also includes a photo album, a slide show, and an interactive feature, Holland Cotter writes about Capa, Chim, and Taro:
They were ... committed to a new style of wartime journalism, which found photographers embedding themselves right in the center of combat...
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ALBA Board members Antonio Muñoz Molina and John Sayles today shared the front page of El País, the most widely read newspaper of the Spanish-speaking world. Muñoz Molina, speaking at the Hay Festival in Segovia, criticized Spaniards' lack of knowledge about their own past. Sayles, meanwhile, screened his new film Amigo, about...
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Sparking media attention world-wide, the International Center of Photography in New York will be opening its doors tomorrow for the exhibit featuring a selection of more than 4,000 negatives of Spanish Civil War material photographed by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim (David Seymour). The two-volume exhibit catalog--which features essays by several...
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As the Jubilee Gardens, home of one of the many British memorials to the International brigades, is getting ready for a major renovation, the Dutch firm West8, which is in charge of the project, is pondering where to relocate the IB monument, LondonSE1 reports.
At last Wednesday's meeting Maarten...
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The Fall Newsletter of our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT) has just come out. In this issue: news on the successful tour of the exhibit Antifascistas; the George Brown Commemorative Lecture; a new IB monument at Perth; reports the memorial ceremony at Jubilee Gardens and a lecture by Richard...
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The Spanish government has announced plans, La Jornada reports, to turn the Mexico-City house in which renowned surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900-1982) spent most of his post-Civil War exile into a culture-historical center that focuses on Buñuel's work but also allows for Spanish-Mexican artistic collaboration more generally. Buñuel's move from the US to...
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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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