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...
Read more »
Raphael Minder, writing for the New York Times, highlights the recent indictments of former Francoist officials by the Argentine judge who, invoking universal jurisdiction, has taken up the case brought by victims of the Franco regime:
When the Argentine judge in the case, María Romilda Servini de Cubría, issued arrest...
Read more »
The United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances closed its visit to Spain yesterday with a poorly attended press conference at which the two UN representatives presented the Spanish government with a long list of urgent tasks: “The State must assume a leadership role and engage more actively to respond to the demands...
Read more »
The exhibit “Chile Vive” featuring historical posters from Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity Government in Chile (1970-73) is on show at El Taller Latino (2710 Broadway, NYC) until November 2. (See here for a review in the Indypendent.) Curators are Andrea Arroyo and Carol Smith, who sends along the following: I had the great privilege...
Read more »
Juan Arana writes (for a version in Spanish, see below): Today, September 29, 2013, a group of friends and sympathizers of the International Brigades, brought together by Luis Granell, a writer and journalist from Zaragoza, gathered in La Puebla de Híjar, Teruel (Spain) to pay tribute to Sam Levinger and all the other members...
Read more »
In 2011, a Chilean judge requested the extradition of Former American Navy Captain Ray E. Davis in connection with the murders of Americans Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi after Pinochet's 1973 coup. However, it appears that Davis had been living in a Santiago nursing home for the last year, before dying of a "multisystemic...
Read more »
The New Yorker's David Denby has followed up his negative review of Ben Urwand's new book, The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler--which claims that major Hollywood studies actively collaborated with Nazi Germany--with a detailed blog post pointing out additional errors and omissions:
Urwand leaves the impression, despite some perfunctory nods to the Hollywood Anti-Nazi...
Read more »
The Mexican Suitcase: The Rediscovered Spanish Civil War Negatives by Capa, Chim, and Taro, the exhibit curated by Cynthia Young of the International Center for Photography, has finally made it back to Mexico City, from where the negatives were recovered several years ago. The show will open at the Antiguo Colegio San Ildefonso on October...
Read more »
Situated next to the old church of Corbera d‘Ebre, a memorial plaque marking the last stand of the British Battalion in Spain in September 1938 was unveiled on 24 September 2013 by family members of those who took part in the Battle of the Ebro. The plaque has been sponsored by the International Brigade Memorial...
Read more »
“What we have before us, Mr. President, is a serious case of violation of human rights and civil liberties, a case of invasion and capture of confidential secret information pertaining to business activities, and above all, a case of disrespect to the national sovereignty of my country.” Dilma Rousseff did not hold back in...
Read more »
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
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.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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...
Read more »
China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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?
Read more »
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.
Read more »
Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
Read more »
Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
Read more »
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
Search the Database