Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. “Of Comradeship and Courage: Three Friends, Three Volunteers” by Morris Brier The Volunteer, v.9 n. 3, November 1987, pp. 8-10. Why at this stage of history do I speak of three comrades, three friends? To me...
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In 2009 an anonymous black International Brigades volunteer became famous when his picture garnered the attention of the international news media. The Spanish government wanted to give the photograph of the man, taken in Barcelona in January 1937 by Catalán photojournalist Agustí Centelles, as a gift to newly elected U.S. President Barack Obama in...
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The following is a reply to the address by the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, to the International Brigade Memorial Trust, on October 15. 2016 A Uachtaráin, a chara, Mr. President, compañero Presidente! We are inspired by your address today. You have kept the honor of Ireland’s flag flying high, as you always...
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Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. “Remembrance Day” by Tom Kozar, November 11, 1988 Originally published in The Volunteer, V. 10, no. 3, December 1988. Today is Remembrance Day and as I woke to the sounds of Vera Lynn’s voice singing the words...
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Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. The Noblest Fruit of Them All by Jim Persoff The Volunteer, Volume 3, No. 5, 1981 When the 14th anti-aircraft battery took up a position in Madrid, somewhere between the Parrios “Tetuan” and “Chamartin,” a team of...
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In the aftermath of the Great War, President Woodrow Wilson’s dream was to make the world “safe for democracy”. Not exactly for democracy in itself as a system of government, but rather for its implicit association with the free market. Economic penetration was conceived as an indispensable path to progress for the capitalist system...
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In the foggy morning, we were greeted by the Mayor of Torija and the President of Guadalajara Memorial in front of the town hall. The town awarded Freedom Medals to delegates honoring IBers. This was the same spot where IBers gathered to receive welcome from the town 79 years ago. Then we rode buses...
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The IBMT made special note of Delmer Berg’s passing at their annual AGM in Dublin on Oct. 15. IBMT Chairman Richard Baxell called on me to say a few words on his behalf. Below is the text of my remarks. It was especially significant to honor the last Lincoln Brigade veteran in the presence...
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The President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, officially opened the Annual General Meeting of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, held in Liberty Hall, Dublin, on October 15. Seated, left to right, are IBMT Ireland Secretary Manus O’Riordan, President Higgins, Sabina Higgins and IBMT Chairperson Richard Baxell. Standing, left to right, are IBMT North West...
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An official inauguration of a monument to the International Brigades was held in front of the Austerlitz train station in Paris on October 22. This was the place where the International Brigaders rode trains to Spain 80 years ago. Among crowded participants (French, Swedish, Danish, Russian, German, Dutch, Italian, Canadian, Polish, USA, UK, Puerto Rico, Romanian, etc.), there was Vicente Almudever (98...
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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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