News from Rhode Island:
In July 1937, John G. Hovan boarded a France-bound boat to fight the rising Fascist powers. He headed to Spain, south across the Pyrenees, where thousands of other volunteers were already fighting a civil war that proved to be a prelude to World War II. The war was...
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A government-led investigation has revealed that the Valley of the Fallen--Franco's massive Civil War monument completed in 1959 after twenty years of construction by forced-labor crews consisting of Republican prisoners--doesn't merely hold Franco's own body, but the bodies of 33,832 others, making it the Spain's largest mass grave. More here.
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After Human Rights Watch and the Robert F. Kennedy Center, Amnesty International, the International Federation for Human Rights, and the World Organization Against Torture join scores of other human-rights organizations in expressing their solidarity with the embattled magistrate, and their bafflement at his possible suspension for investigating crimes against humanity committed...
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From InsideToronto:
In 1936, Norman Bethune headed to Spain to provide medical care on the battlefield and this is where he developed the world's first mobile medical unit to administer blood transfusions on the spot, which saved many lives. He's revered in China and remembered in Montreal, but more than...
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From CNN:
Historians and teachers have reason to be deeply concerned over the latest actions taken by the Texas Board of Education regarding social studies curriculum standards.
Many conservatives are simply unwilling to accept how much the writing and teaching of American history has changed...
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Monday, March 29, 7:00 p.m. Queridísmos verdugos (Basilio Martín Patino, 1977, 100 mins). Programmed by Helen Graham, King Juan Carlos Chair in Spanish Culture and Civilization/Professor of Modern Spanish History, Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London. Introduced by Sarah Thomas, PhD candidate, NYU Department of Spanish and Portuguese. In Spanish...
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Today in the Times:
Spain’s Supreme Court announced Thursday that an investigating magistrate could proceed with a case against a crusading judge known internationally for indicting Osama bin Laden and the Chilean dictator Read more »
About to be released in the US: the Henri Cartier-Bresson Collector's Edition, featuring two of his Spanish Civil War films, Victory of Life (1937) and Spain Will Live (1938).
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28th Annual Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival, April 15th-30th, 2010, featuring A War in Hollywood (Hollywood contra Franco), by Oriol Porta, which tells the story of Alvah Bessie. Trailer here.
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Sunday, May 30, 2:00 pm (doors open at 1:00 pm). Songs of the Spanish Civil War: Barbara Dane w/ Bruce Barthol and friends, guest speaker: Maria Blanco. $20.50 advance / $21.50 at door
Purchase tickets online
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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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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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On May 3, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice Community received the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism at a ceremony in New York City. Executive Director Audrey Sasson delivered the following acceptance speech.
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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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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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