Annual IBMT Len Crome Memorial Conference Date: Saturday 7th March 2015 Guernica: the destruction of a town and the creation of a masterpiece Speakers: Gijs van Hensbergen, Nicholas Rankin, Helen Little and Manuel Moreno Date: Saturday 7th March 2015Time: 11 am – 5 pm (optional meal in the evening).Venue: The Manchester Conference Centre and Hotel, Sackville Street, M1 3BBCost: Conference and...
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The legacy of the courageous, young war photographer, Gerda Taro, was once buried in history. With the discovery of the photographic negatives, that have come to be known as The Mexican Suitcase, she is being rediscovered and her legacy celebrated. The first female photojournalist to shoot from the front lines, and the first to...
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A United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances released a report on Thursday giving Spain 90 days to provide “schedule indicating the measures that will be taken” in regard to a long list of recommendations. The report comes on the heels of a fact-finding mission conducted last September. It addresses a wide-range of...
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Wilfried Stuckmann and his wife were visiting Spain from Germany when they accidentally discovered that their luxury hotel had been a concentration camp during the Spanish Civil War. The hotel booking site had given no clue as to the Hostal San Marco’s dark past. It had been touted for its impressive antique furnishings and...
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A musical memorial was held in Poughkeepsie on Friday, July 18 for Toshi and Pete Seeger. The free concert was part, SeegerFest, a free, five day festival celebrating the lives, work, activism and music of Pete and Toshi. Events were held in in the Hudson Valley and New York City and was organized by their...
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In one of the most moving episodes in the history of international diplomacy, between 1939 and 1942 the administration of Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas provided refuge to 25,000 Spanish exiles from their French concentration camps. Seventy-five years ago the first of the three boats, the Sinaia, arrived in the state of Veracruz carrying the...
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“I do not regret at all having been in Spain at the time, I would not have missed it for the world. For me it was the teaching of my life; I learned camaraderie, solidarity, to be considerate of others.” Hans Landauer, Austrian Brigader We are sad to report that we received notice this...
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The Spanish historian Ángel Viñas, who was interviewed by the Volunteer last year, summarizes his research findings for the magazine Témpora in a concise new piece on the causes and responsibilities of the Spanish Civil War. Read it here (in Spanish). More on Prof. Viñas’s blog.
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One of the most memorable and original renditions of the Spanish Civil War songs that Pete Seeger made famous were recorded in the late 1960s by the Liberation Orchestra, under the brilliant direction of bassist and activist Charlie Haden. Haden passed away this week.
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On July 9, one month after his 97th birthday, Gert Hoffmann, passed on peacefully and safely at home in Austria. Gert joined the International Brigade in 1938. Upon the defeat of the Spanish Republic he, along with some 400,000 Spanish, crossed the border into France where they found themselves interned on the beaches in...
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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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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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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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