The soccer World Cup opens this Friday in South Africa. Spain, reigning European champion, is starting off as one of the favorites. But a lot is riding on the national team's potential success, the New York Times reports today. A cup would help ease--or at least distract from--the country's economic woes.
The International Criminal Court is in the midst of its 2010 review conference. One of the topics of discussion is the possibility of increased U.S. cooperation with the Court in The Hague. Recent developments in Spain have further complicated the picture, European Affairs editor Bill Marmon writes in a detailed analysis:
Read more »
French paper Le Monde interviewed Juan Salas on his discovery of With the Lincoln Brigade in Spain, the long-lost Spanish Civil War documentary by Henri Cartier-Bresson (videoclip here).
Read more »
Associations of victims and their descendants decry the fact that, in spite of the provisions of the so-called Historical Memory Law of December 2007, access to Spanish military archives--which, among other things, hold information on Francoist trials--continues to pose serious problems to researches and family members. Part of the problem--Público reports--is a...
Read more »
Local amateur historian Michael Muñoz has uncovered the roots of farm workers' organized labor in the activism of Spanish emigrants who, via Hawaii, ended up in Vacaville, California in the early 1930s. A video presentation here.
Read more »
During the last weekend of May, the national organizations of friends of International Brigade veterans (Coordinación Internacional de Asociaciones de amigos de los combatientes en la España republicana, or ACER) met in Paris, among other things to plan a series of events to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the International Brigades in...
Read more »
In its online Memorial Day slide show last week, The Nation included an image of Republican troops marching in Madrid (image 4), and a letter from a Lincoln Brigader that the magazine published in 1937.
Read more »
A video of a talk by biographer Irme Schaber on Gerda Taro, the Spanish Civil War photographer who worked with Robert Capa and died in Spain, and whose images will be part of the "Mexican Suitcase" exhibit at the ICP this fall.
Read more »
Forced as a child to live with her aunt, Conxa toils the harsh farmland of the Pyrenees, finding love in the form of local builder, Jaume, until his involvement with the Communist revolutionaries threatens her hard-won security.
As lapidary as its title suggests, this is a book of muted emotions. Conxa’s world is one in...
Read more »
The website of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives has just had a facelift. Check out the new look and improved navigation, including the ALBA Digital Library...
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