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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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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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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The iconic group portrait of raggedy Lincoln Brigade volunteers that’s become ALBA’s calling card over the years is now finally available in an uncropped, high-res print. When and where was it taken? And who exactly are these 29 men?
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Tina Modotti and Vittorio Vidali, who dedicated a major part of their lives to the Communist International, have long been surrounded by myth. New research by the historian David Jorge suggests that they consistently strove for broad leftist fronts—even when the leadership of the Comintern favored other tactics.
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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
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Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
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Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
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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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