The Guardian today: "Baltasar Garzón, who has taken aim at Augusto Pinochet and Silvio Berlusconi, among others, now finds himself pursued on three different fronts as a series of writs challenging his impartiality and accusing him of abuse of authority are investigated by the supreme court. his supporters see the attacks...
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José-Luis Peñafuerte (Belgium, Spain: 2009). Screened this week at the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. Trailer here:
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Stuart Christie's site is a treasure trove of Spanish Civil War- and Anarchism-related films.
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Are ALBA's institutes for high-school teachers proof of the "corruption of the academy"? Or are some people's reactions and suspicions proof of a particular pathology afflicting students of American Communism and Anti-Communism? An interesting discussion on an historians' listerv.
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Nick Ravich at Art21: "The biggest treat of the evening was the world premiere of the recently rediscovered 20-minute, silent 35mm film With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (1937-38)."
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Amanda Hopkinson in The Independent: "Essentially, this is the account of one day in the first year of the war, 19th August 1936, when pyres of books were assembled and abused by posses of Falangists on the beaches of Galicia, and its aftermath."
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Graham Keeley in the London Times: "Today, for the first time, relatives of those held in the camps will discover how an army of faceless civil servants made sure that the books were balanced — evoking comparisons with the efficiency of their Nazi counterparts — when hundreds of files go on display at...
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Last month, the Los Angeles Times came in defense of Baltasar Garzón, the investigative magistrate from Spain who is threatened with suspension because of his attempt to investigate crimes against humanity committed under Francoism.
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El País highlights ALBA's investigative work on a gift for President Obama. Click here for an English translation.
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Last August, Matti Mattson became the third surviving Lincoln vet to acquire Spanish citizenship. (Video)
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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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All families have secrets, and I discovered mine at a young age, in a box or paper bag, I don’t remember which, in the closet. I knew even then it was a secret, an important secret because no one in my family wanted to talk about my prescient treasure: letters and photographs. I was...
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Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, James D. Fernández had agreed to visit Picasso’s Guernica in Madrid with a group of students from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. The trip was canceled, and instead, he delivered a zoom lecture to the students about Guernica without Guernica, which we...
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Bob Ford, who worked in Hollywood and fought in Spain and World War II, suffered relentless surveillance because of his radical past, as did his wife, Augusta Ain. In 1950 they moved to New Zealand—and never looked back. 4 February 1938 We just returned from Madrid. We had rather a good time except the...
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In 1999, Catherine Wigginton Greene won ALBA’s Watt Award with an essay on Salaria Kea, the only African American nurse to serve in the Spanish Civil War. Twenty-four years later, Wigginton is a successful novelist, filmmaker, and educational consultant whose work still focuses on the themes that drew her to Kea as an undergraduate...
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Sarah Watling is an award-winning author who recently published Tomorrow Perhaps the Future, in which she weaves together the stories of women whose lives were affected by the Spanish Civil War, including Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, Jessica Mitford, Nancy Cunard, Virginia Woolf, Salaria Kea, and Gerda Taro. Your first...
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The Right’s culture war on schools, universities, and history teachers—thinly disguised as a crusade against straw men like “divisive concepts” and “critical race theory”—is showing no sign of letting up. According to a tracking project at the UCLA Law School, between September 2020 and July 2023, “a total of 214 local, state, and federal...
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Has fascism arrived in the United States? Will it soon? Or has it been living among us for many years? These are the questions that drive the twelve essays gathered in Fascism in America: Past and Present, a new collection edited by Gavriel Rosenfeld and Janet Ward, two prominent historians of the Holocaust.
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Stuart Christie, who died in August 2020, was best known as the 18-year-old Scottish anarchist who, in the summer 1964, was part of an attempt to assassinate General Francisco Franco. It was only the beginning of a long life dedicated to left-wing activism.
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The day after Franco’s troops entered Barcelona, Otília Castellví, a young seamstress, woke up to a city she could barely recognize.
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Lincoln veteran Hugo Heurich (1908-1982) was born in Germany and had emigrated to the US in 1929. He arrived in Spain in March 1937 and returned to the US in December 1938. In November 2020, his great-nephew, Armin Heurich, contacted ALBA in November 2020 looking for additional information to include in his great uncle’s oral history, These...
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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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