La buena nueva (2008), a Spanish Civil War film directed by Helena Taberna and starring Bárbara Goenaga, received the Special Jury Prize for Acting at the Amsterdam Film Festival:
A young priest arrives in his first assignment to a small parish serving a working-class village in the first days of...
Read more »
A ceremony was held at the IB Memorial in London two days ago:
This was the first year that there were no veterans of the conflict at the annual celebration, although seven from Britain still survive and were awarded Spanish Passports by the Spanish Government in 2009 as a gesture...
Read more »
What exactly is the legal status of the hundreds of thousands of sentences issued by Francoist tribunals during and after the Civil War? To the frustration of many associated with the movement calling for a "recovery of historical memory," Spain's "Historical Memory Law" of 2007 did not include an a massive annulment of...
Read more »
Raphael Minder, writing in today's New York Times, talks about Spain's economic crisis with two dinosaurs of Spanish politics: Manuel Fraga, Franco's minister of propaganda in the sixties and later president of Galicia, and Santiago Carrillo, former secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party. For the latter, the crisis provides an opportunity...
Read more »
Last week Human Rights Watch issued a critical report on the work of the United Nations' Human Rights Council, founded in 2006 in place of the UN Commission on Human Rights and up for review in 2011. HRW's report takes a comprehensive look at the Council's successes and failures, calling on the...
Read more »
Seventy years ago, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the ruthless dictator of the Dominican Republic, welcomed the first group of Spanish Republican refugees, initiating one of the most contradictory and tragic episodes of the postwar Spanish diaspora--an event on whose commemoration in the DR Público reports today. Trujillo's generosity toward the thousands of Spaniards fleeing Franco and...
Read more »
In a rare interview, Garzón has told the Spanish radio network Cadena Ser that he is reasonably pessimistic about his career at this point. Speaking from the house of his friend José Saramago--the recently deceased Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize winner--where he participated in the presentation of a biography on the writer, Garzón...
Read more »
Amnesty International urges the parliament of Catalonia not to ban the use of full-face covering veils in public:
"Any wide-ranging ban will violate the rights to freedom of expression and religion of those women who choose to wear a full-face veil as an expression of their identity or beliefs," said...
Read more »
In a report released yesterday, Human Rights Watch calls out France, Germany, and Britain for using intelligence obtained in other countries through torture:
"Berlin, Paris, and London should be working to eradicate torture, not relying on foreign torture intelligence," said Judith Sunderland, senior Western Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch....
Read more »
Joseph Waltz writes in the Monthly Review on the conversations that John Gerassi--son of a Spanish Republican general and author of The Premature Antifascists, on the Lincoln Brigade--had in the early 1970s with Jean-Paul Sartre:
“Wow,” Sartre replies, “you really want to put me on the spot today…OK...
Read more »
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
“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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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
Search the Database