The first in a new series of posts highlighting monuments to the International Brigades worldwide. Canberra, Australia; S 35° 18.012 E 149° 07.201 (map). Inaugurated in 1993. From Waymarking.com:
The memorial is a wall of sandstone blocks with red brick courses. ... The bronze map was made by Dr Ross...
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Patrick Skene Catling, writing in the Irish Times, critically reviews a new biography of the man who worked with Willi Münzenberg and Arthur Koestler to organize the International Brigades, and who is said to have inspired the movie Casablanca:
Otto Katz (1895-1952) was a Stalinist agent of first-magnitude international stardom. He...
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In a strongly worded op-ed piece in today's Público, Carlos Jiménez Villarejo, former Chief Prosecutor for corruption cases, chides the Spanish Supreme Court for the cavalier way in which it recently dismissed Judge Baltasar Garzón's appeal. (More background here.) According to Jiménez, the Supreme Court should have given much more serious consideration to...
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Alex de la Iglesia and Carolina Bang speak to Little White Lies about the Balada triste de trompeta, which just won several prizes in Venice and is now showing at the San Sebastián festival:
Everybody in Spain has a father or grandfather who was involved in the war. Everybody...
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The Telegraph published an obit of the SCW vet classicist yesterday:
Though left for dead in a pool of blood, he somehow managed to make it to a dressing station, his will to live miraculously restored by the appearance of the journalist Claud Cockburn with a bottle of scotch.
MoreThe Times' Edward Rothstein writes about Nueva York, 1613-1945, in which ALBA collaborated and for which James D. Fernández has curated an accompanying exhibit which opens today:
Instead of viewing the city and its past along an East-West axis and seeing its conflicts and culture through interactions with...
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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, is opening this Friday, September 17, at 6:15pm at NYU's King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (53 Washington Square South).
In the early decades of the twentieth century, New York experienced a substantial influx...
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Judge Baltasar Garzón Real, who has been suspended from his post at Spain's National Criminal Court for his investigations of possible crimes against humanity committed under the Franco regime, has been honored with the Hrant Dink Award, named after the prominent Armenian journalist who was assassinated by a Turkish nationalist in January 2007....
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Broadcasting with Democracy Now! from Germany, ALBA Activist Award-winning Amy Goodman interviews the Spanish human rights attorney Juan Garcés, who worked as an advisor to Chilean President Salvador Allende until his death in the 1973 coup, and who was a key player in the 1998 indictment and arrest of General Pinochet, as...
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The Art Daily reports:
Tate Modern will present the first major retrospective of Joan Miró (1893–1983) to be held in London for almost 50 years. Opening on 14 April 2011, Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape will bring together over 150 paintings, works on paper and sculptures...
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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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