The Spanish newspaper Público is publishing a series of stories of victims of Francoist repression--stories that, it says, the Spanish courts are refusing to hear. In November 2008, a month after his controversial October 2008 brief indicting the Franco regime for crimes against humanity, judge Baltasar Garzón disqualified himself from the case (se inhibió), passing...
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Picasso was no friend of Franco--or was he? "Although his political sympathies are known to have lain with the hard left, it turns out he was not above breaking bread with Franco's regime.", Vanessa Thorpe reports in today's Guardian on new information discovered by Picasso experts John Richardson and Gijs van Hensbergen:
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Yesterday the French Minister of Culture , Frederic Mitterrand, revealed a statue in honor of the Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens, whose The Spanish Earth (1937) is one of the best known documentaries of the Spanish Civil War. The sculpture, 36 feet high, is the work of Irish artist Bryan McCormack. The Joris Ivens Foundation reports:
Carl Geiser, a key political leader in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and author of a pioneering book,Prisoners of the Good Fight, died November 28 in Corvallis, Oregon. View images of the memorial service here.
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An interview with Professor Francie Cate-Arries of the College of William and Mary about her recent work with students in Madrid exploring the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War.
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This Wednesday evening, the Filmoteca Española in Madrid screened Henri Cartier-Bresson's recently recovered Spanish Civil War documentary With the Lincoln Brigade, presented by Juan Salas, who discovered the film. Also present was ALBA board member Soledad Fox. See here for a report in Público, here for more on the discovery, here...
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Russia and Spain are making 2011 a year of mutual cultural-historical interest. Among other initiatives, ITAR-TASS reports, there will be a exhibit of masterpieces from the Prado at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and an show of the Russian collection of Spanish Civil War posters:
the Russians also want to...
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The University of Delaware reports the acquisition of the literary archive of American playwright Barrie Stavis (1906-2007):
Stavis knew at an early age that he would pursue a career as a writer. During the 1930s he struggled with his writing, but in 1937 sailed for Europe to volunteer his...
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The Spanish section of Amnesty International issued an annual report yesterday, at the presentation of which Claudio Cordone, interim director of AI Spain, called the trial against Garzón "scandalous." In the report, Amnesty criticizes the Spanish government for failing "to accept some of the recommendations made by States in the UN Working Group...
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Antonio Muñoz Molina, renowned Spanish novelist and public intellectual, as well as a member of ALBA's Board of Governors, has received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Brandeis University. His recent bestselling historical novel on the Spanish Civil War, La noche de los tiempos, is reviewed by Michael Kerrigan in this week's...
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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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