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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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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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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To be, or not to to be, that is the question. / Are you now, or have you ever been, that is the question
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Few Americans know how integral Seattle has been to radical movements of the 20th century. In fact, it was Seattle-based Lincoln vets who played an important role in the installation of the first US monument to the International Brigades.
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In 1946, the leadership of Edward Barsky’s Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee. For Ernestina González and Manuel Magaña, the brave gesture of defiance was only one chapter in their activist lives.
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The iconic group portrait of raggedy Lincoln Brigade volunteers that’s become ALBA’s calling card over the years is now finally available in an uncropped, high-res print. When and where was it taken? And who exactly are these 29 men?
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Tina Modotti and Vittorio Vidali, who dedicated a major part of their lives to the Communist International, have long been surrounded by myth. New research by the historian David Jorge suggests that they consistently strove for broad leftist fronts—even when the leadership of the Comintern favored other tactics.
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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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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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