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 Foreign Language Department’s Spanish program at El Camino Community College (Torrance, California) is commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War with a series of activities and lectures from November 8 to 12. The five-day program includes talks on mass graves, pictorial art, military fortifications, news coverage in the US of the conflict,...
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Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. Albin C. Ragner: Mostest First-Line Infantryman by Benjamin Goldring The Volunteer, Volume 5, Number 2, June 1983. Albin C. Ragner, Lincoln Battalion Veteran, does not appear to have made it into any books or any print on...
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First to Fight: American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) Explore this pivotal event in Spanish–and world–history and culture! Parallels to today include Syria, Ukraine, & the rise of rightwing populism. Oct. 29 – Northampton – Breakouts in Spanish and in English. $25. Lunch and materials provided. Led by Kelley Brown, Easthampton HS....
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Notes from the Biographical Dictionary Project. Saul Freidberg provided several short biographical sketches on fellow veterans. The sketches provide insight into Friedberg as well. Eugene David Bronstein By Saul Freidberg, April 22, 1996 Bronstein was born in NYC about 1915. He went to CCNY, from which he was graduated in 1934, where he...
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Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. A Shout of Triumph By Lloyd L. Brown The Volunteer, December 1975, p. 7 Like millions of people around the world, my fellow-Soldiers at a U. S. Army base were overjoyed to hear that Hitler’s forces...
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Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. “My Grandfather, Sam Gonshak,” by Amber Glassberg Originally appeared in The Volunteer, V.9, No. 3, November 1987. An essay submitted for an Honors English Class for which Amber received and A++ by her teacher Mrs....
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Late this May 2016 I attended the 6th annual “Anti-Fascist Harbor Event” in the port of Germany’s second largest city Hamburg, on the occasion of the 80th Anniversary of the formation of the Inter-national Brigades. It was organized by the German KFSR: Kämpfer und Freunde der Spanischen Republik ’36-’39, the Fighters and Friends of...
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Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. “What Wonderful People” by Leo Rosenberg Originally published in The Volunteer, Volume 10, Number 3, December 1988. One of my sons, who lives in Cleveland, sent me a human interest item the other day. I had...
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Blast from the Past is an ongoing series reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. Gus by Ed Lending The Volunteer, Volume 5, Number 1, February 1983. It’s reassuring to know that our comrades will not pass out of our lives un-commemorated. My own failure to fittingly solemnize one comrade’s death has been...
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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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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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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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