On February 1, 2014 I had the honor of bringing fraternal greetings from ALBA to the International Brigades Commemoration Committee, where an overflow crowd met to honor these men from Belfast who joined common cause in the earliest battlefields in the war against fascism in Spain. The International Brigades Commemoration Committee exists to...
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Our friends in the UK at the International Brigade Memorial Trust have just sent us their latest newsletter: 28 pages with articles on the new Ebro memorial, news on the Madrid monument, and the British seafarers who defied fascist bombs and U-boats to trade with Republican Spain, in addition to book reviews and much more. Read it in...
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“If George Orwell and Laurie Lee were to return from the Spanish civil war today, they would be arrested under section five of the Terrorism Act 2006,” George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian yesterday, If convicted of fighting abroad with a “political, ideological, religious or racial motive” – a charge they would find hard to contest –...
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Pope Francis has attacked unfettered capitalism as "a new tyranny." But the silence maintained by the former Argentinian bishop Bergoglio (now Pope Francis), during the brutal Argentinian dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, puzzles many people.
Vicente Navarro got a clue from the recent Tarragona service (honoring the members of the Church who...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, which is dedicated to educating future generations about the Spanish Civil War, is engaged in a renewed effort to reach out the members of the second and third generations to help recuperate and preserve the collective history of the Spaniards and Internationals who fought fascism. Our aim is to...
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Along with thousands others, Carlos Blanco left Spain defeated but managed to preserve what is most admirable of the Spanish Republican values at the core of his identity, and to return them to the world through his actions.
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One of the two last reported living veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Delmer Berg, is turning 98 tomorrow, Friday December 20. We invited you to send your birthday greetings earlier this week and have been completely overwhelmed by the response. The package to Del has gone out; below is a small sampling of your good...
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Mike Elkin, writing for Newsweek, tackles Spain's lingering legacy of violence committed during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship.
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Alasdair Fotheringham, writing for The Independent, explores a curiously uninformative official heritage trail--the first of its kind established by a governmental entity--commemorating a Spanish Civil War battlefield outside of Madrid.
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ALBA PROUDLY PRESENTS: A screening of the passionate musical Goodbye Barcelona In 1936, as fascism sweeps across Europe, one country reaches out in its hour of need…and tens of thousands of ordinary people make an extraordinary decision to help. More than 42,000 travel to Spain from all over the world, risking their lives for the freedom 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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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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