During a visit to a secret detention center in Argentina employed during the Junta years (1976-83), the Spanish investigative magistrate Baltasar Garzón--suspended for his attempt to open an investigation of crimes against humanity committed during the Franco dictatorship--took advantage to defend the principle of universal jurisdiction, which stipulates that any domestic courts may try...
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The newly redesigned website of the office of the Spanish Prime Minister, the Moncloa Palace, no longer mentions Franco as a former head of state, but instead only lists the country's five Prime Ministers since 1976, Público reports. The previous iteration of the website listed leaders going back to the early nineteenth...
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"This is War! Robert Capa at Work" along with a selection of Spanish Civil War work by Gerda Taro--a combined exhibit that first opened at the International Center of Photography in New York two years ago--has made it to Madrid, El País reports. The show will be up at the
Alan Singer, who teaches at Hofstra, was asked to give this year's graduation address at University Heights High School in the Bronx. He turned to Dolores Ibárruri for inspiration:
Stand up! Defend the rights of children! Endure sacrifice rather than grant victory to forces that represent oppression and tyranny. Teachers!...
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David Rovics has written a song honoring Lincoln vet Bob Steck. Read the lyrics at Anti-War Songs / Canzoni Contro la Guerra or listen to it here:
They say people get conservative /
The older that they age /
They say that being radical /
Is just...
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A section on Lincoln vet Abe Osheroff at the Voices Education Project. Includes great photos.
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As reported earlier, the Spain's 2007 Law of Historical Memory did not annul Francoist sentences, although it did, ambiguously, declare the tribunals that issued them to be “illegitimate.” As a result, it is now up to individual victim's families to request actual legal annulments. After Andulucía's request for an annulment in the...
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José Ignacio Torreblanca, writing for the Financial Times, assesses Spain's victory at the FIFA World Cup in light of the state of the country:
Rarely can sporting triumph have come as such a welcome distraction as World Cup victory has...
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An hour-long radio debate on the impunity of Francoist repression and the possibilities of seeking of legal recourse, broadcast last month by Contratiempo. Featuring Emilio Silva, founding president of the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory, as well as three magistrates: Ramón Saéz Valcarcel, Ignacio Ubaldo González de la Vega, and José Miguel García...
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Human Rights Watch has issued a report proposing "a framework for improving US immigration law that would give immigrant crime victims a chance to seek justice, protect workers, respect the private and family life of longtime residents, and provide fair treatment for immigrants who come before the courts." More here.
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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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