Click here for the latest issue (no. 25) of the newsletter published by the London-based International Brigade Memorial Trust. In this issue: news on the yearly IBMT lecture, IBMT's travelling exhibit, and coverage of the removal of part of an IB memorial.
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On March 13th the International Brigade Memorial Trust held a celebration in London's Imperial War Museum of the life of its late President, Jack Jones .
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Nearly every year, from the time I was a graduate student studying Spanish literature, I have taught at least one course devoted to the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. Once in a while some small story reaches across the pedagogical pavement that separates “history” from “today.” This spring alone brought two such...
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This Sunday's El País Semanal magazine features Lydia Lunch, who is about to launch a book and CD entitled Amnesia, inspired by Belchite, produced together with Jacob Kirkegaard.
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Cynthia Wright reviews Michael Petrou's Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008) in the March 2010 issue of the Canadian Historical Review: Petrou "draws on the extensive archive of veteran interviews created by Hoar's researcher, Mac Reynolds, and supplements these with additional interviews of about a dozen surviving...
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Did you know that you can support ALBA by buying books through Powell's, the nation's largest independent bookstore? Check out ALBA's online bookshelf here.
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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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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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