Earlier this month, Pope Francis 'beatified' over 500 Spanish Clerics 'martyred' in the Spanish Civil War, despite opposition asserting that the Catholic Church has not yet apologized for its role in the war and Francisco Franco's dictatorship. In spite of the UN's recent efforts to open a full public investigation of Franco's crimes,...
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Today, October 22, marks 100 years since Robert Capa's birth in Budapest, Hungary. One of the most famed photojournalists of the 20th century, Capa's reputation has been challenged in recent years by claims that the "Falling Soldier," arguably his most famous photo, was staged. Earlier today, the International Center of Photography released one...
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The family of John Dos Passos, the American novelist and public intellectual who began visiting Spain in the 1920s and was deeply involved in the Spanish Civil War, has announced the launch of a new website dedicated to the author's legacy: www.johndospassos.com. A press release about the launch is here.
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Len Crome lecture: Taking Sides: Artists and Writers and the Spanish Civil War Date/Time: Saturday, 1st March, 2014 11 am – 5 pm (optional Spanish evening meal 6pm – 9pm) Speakers: Republican Education and the Arts: Carl-Henrik Bjerstrom The Representation of the International Brigades in Spanish Cinema: Carmen Herrero Gerda Taro and Robert Capa: Photographing War: Jane...
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ALBA is pleased to present Impugning Impunity: A Human Rights Documentary Film Series, which will be held from November 22-24, 2013 at Pace University in the Multipurpose Room, 3 Spruce Street New York, NY 10038 (press release here). Now in its third year, this annual film series activates a community-wide dialogue on human rights...
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In 2011, David Graeber’s monumental book "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" was published. In that very same year, he burst into national consciousness with the Occupy Wall Street movement he helped to spark.
This year, he has written a daring book “The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement.” Part reflection on Occupy...
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Spain's cooperative newspaper La Marea, which just launched its new website, has published an op-ed column about last year's verdict by the Spanish Supreme Court that closed the judicial avenue as a way to seek reparation and justice for the victims of Francoism (while acquitting Baltasar Garzón after having disbarred him in another case). Reading the...
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Last month, an Argentinian judge named María Romilda Servini de Cubría, called for Antonio González Pacheco's extradition. One of the Franco's most notorious torturers, Antonio González Pacheco, was reportedly spotted running in a Madrid half-marathon.
On Sunday, El Mundo newspaper published a photograph of González Pacheco that shocked many of his alleged...
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While Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon was giving a speech on proposed abortion reforms three pro-abortion activists, associated with the feminist group Femen, staged a protest in the public gallery of Madrid’s parliament. The three women who had written “abortion is sacred” on their chests while chanting the phrase were taken into police custody. Lara...
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In his new book, Franco’s Crypt, British biographer Jeremy Treglown challenges the idea that during the years of the Franco regime Spain was a intellectual and cultural wasteland. Mr. Treglown writes about subversive elements in the arts. Many paintings, books, and other works of arts in Spain, he argues, used symbolism, hyper realism, and...
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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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