“The United States military intelligence services played a pivotal role in setting up the murders of two American citizens in 1973, providing the Chilean military with the information that led to their deaths, a court here has ruled,” Pascale Bonnefoy writes in the New York Times today: The recent court decision found that an American naval...
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From our friends at the IBMT: One of Spain’s leading campaigners for justice for the tens of thousands of victims of Franco’s dictatorship will address the annual commemoration this Saturday (5 July 2014) for the British volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War as part of the legendary International Brigades. Emilio Silva will...
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Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory since 1936. By Jeremy Treglown. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.)
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Our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust are getting ready for their annual gathering at the IB monument in Jubilee Gardens, London: Saturday July 5,2014 IB Memorial, Jubilee Gardens, South Bank, London SE1 Assemble 12:30, program runs to 2pm Music from Maddy Carty and Na-mara Speakers include Emilio Silva of Spain’s Association for...
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The actress and activist Ruby Dee, a long-time friend of the veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, passed away this week at age 91. From her obituary in the New York Times: Ms. Dee went from being a disciple of Paul Robeson to starring with Mr. Poitier on Broadway. She was a featured player in the...
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Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has been elected a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his accomplishments with the EJI, NYU reports: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected 204 new members this year, including Nobel Prize winner in chemistry Dan Shechtman; Pulitzer Prize...
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This coming May 20-23, the Fundación Internacional Baltasar Garzón is sponsoring an international conference on the challenges facing the principle of Universal Jurisdiction, whose application was recently curbed by the Spanish government (see Adam Hochschild's piece in the New York Times). Participants include Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch, Wolfgang Kaleck, general...
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“In most countries, there is no statute of limitations for murder. Should there be one for torture?” Adam Hochschild asks in a New York Times op-ed today; In Spain, neither charge can be brought against anyone who worked for the harsh, long-lasting regime of Francisco Franco, because of an amnesty law that eased the country’s...
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Anna Martí, who has been following in the Lincolns' footsteps for The Volunteer, sends this video (with English subtitles) of her recent journey re-tracing the night time retreat between Batea and Corbera over the 1st and 2nd of April 1938.
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Marshall Mateer has produced a video report (running for just under 10 minutes) of the IBMT’s conference, Taking Sides: Artists and Writers on the Spanish Civil War, which was held in Manchester on March 1st. Separate videos of all four lectures will be posted on the IBMTnews YouTube site in due course.
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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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