EFE reports that former Chilean president Michele Bachelet, visiting in Spain last week, defended the need for historical memory and, in particular, the way in which Chile has dealt with its repressive past through judicial means--notably different from Spain. In response to a question about the controversy surrounding Judge Garzón's attempt to open...
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This morning's issue of El País highlights the exhibit "La Colonia, Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898-1945," curated by ALBA's James D. Fernández and co-sponsored by ALBA and the K Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at NYU, opening September 17th at 6:15pm. Through some sixty family photographs and other objects, the show...
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A lengthy obituary by G.W. Bowersock in The New Republic:
Not far from Madrid he received a serious wound to his neck and right shoulder that brought him close to death. He later recalled that as the blood drained out of him he had felt full of rage that he was...
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EITB reports:
A court in Argentina has reopened an investigation into killings committed during the Spanish Civil War and the early years of the Franco dictatorship, such as human rights groups and families of victims requested, court officials reported this week. The court overturned a previous...
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On September 25th, as part of the Hay Festival in Segovia, judge Baltasar Garzón will be interviewed about developments in Universal Justice by Eduardo Martín de Pozuelos, who covers terrorism for La Vanguardia. More information here.
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At the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair, Kevin Doyle interviewed the young Spanish Anarchist Manuel García:
We are very involved with the movement to recover historical memory. But not only in the sense of identifying the victims and what happened in this and that situation. As anarchists we are also involved in order...
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The Film Archive(d) has posted the full 1983 TV debut of George Selden, in which the legendary journalist recounts his decades-long career, including his coverage of the Spanish Civil War:
Although George Seldes was one of the giants in the history of American journalism, particularly in the field of press...
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La Colonia: Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898-1945 (KJCC, Sept. 17-Dec.); Mexican Suitcase (ICP, Sept. 24-Jan.); Nueva York Roundtable (KJCC, Nov. 11).
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In one their largest projects so far, the Spanish anthropolist Francisco Etxeberria and the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory have concluded the exhumation of a mass grave at La Pedraja (province of Burgos) holding the bodies of more than 100 individuals executed by the rebel forces in the first month of the...
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In a letter to the Washington Post, W. Royal Stokes fondly recalls Professor Knox's classes at Yale:
Professor Knox never spoke in class of his wartime experiences, namely, manning a machine gun in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 or parachuting behind enemy lines in France and commanding an infantry...
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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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