Victor Grossman, of the German organization “Fighters and Friends of the Spanish Republic” sent a brief overview of their annual Spain Conference in Berlin to share with the ALBA community. “Held in late October 2014, the annual Spain Conference, as always included friends from similar organizations in other countries – this time Spain, France,...
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Great news from the Netherlands, where a group of volunteers has started an online biographical database of all the Dutch who fought in Spain between 1936 and 1939 to defend the Spanish Republic against the forces of General Franco. This is the first exhaustive investigation into the Dutch volunteers.In the Netherlands the Spanish Civil...
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The 1971 break-in at the FBI office in Media, PA, which led to the discovery of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s secret COINTELPRO operation, was never solved by the FBI. But the mystery of that break-in was revealed earlier this year in Betty Medsger’s book "The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s...
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The voices of British Battalion’s Charlie Donnelly, Bob Doyle, John Cornford, Jim Haughey and Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria) were heard again at the Shankill Road Library in Belfast this August. Moving readings of their poetry and memoirs were delivered by Marlene Sideway, IBMT President and actor, Dr. Sinead Morrissey, Belfast’s first poet Laureate, and...
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Ruby Dee, legendary actress, author and activist was honored with a public memorial celebration at the Riverside Church in New York City on Sept. 20. She and her husband Ossie Davis, long-time friends of the veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, were extraordinarily generous and bold, lending their celebrity to a host of leftist causes....
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Over the course of three days, a selection of cutting-edge human rights documentaries will challenge, educate, and inspire audiences at IMPUGNING IMPUNITY: ALBA’s Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (program and trailers here). Now in its fourth year, and featuring films produced since 2013, this annual film festival brings human rights struggles to life through...
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The exhibition of Lincoln Vet Ralph Fasanella’s paintings “Ralph Fasanella: Lest We Forget,” organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, opens on Tuesday (Sept. 2) at the American Folk Art Museum. (Through Nov. 30, 2 Lincoln Square, 212-595-9533, folkartmuseum.org.)
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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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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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