"Now we're far from that valley of sorrow/But its mem'ry we'll never forget/In the midst of the struggles around us/Let's remember our glorious dead." The lyrics of the International Brigade ballad "Jarama Valley" immortalized by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger continue to ring true 75 years after the survivors of the Abraham Lincoln...
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Our friends at the IBMT have posted Paul Preston's lecture on George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, read at the Len Crome Memorial event by IBMT secretary Jim Jump (Preston himself was unable to attend). See the video below or on YouTube. Marshall Mateer provides some useful context for a U.S. audience:
Morecambe...
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On July 8, a delegation organized by Friends and Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade met with Juan Ramón Martínez Salazar, the Consul General of Spain and Íñigo Ramírez de Haro Valdés, Attaché for Cultural Affairs, to follow up on the letter to the Ambassador protesting the removal of the IB monument in Madrid,...
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The annual commemoration in honor of the International Brigades was held in London on July 6. See a slideshow here, courtesy of photographer Guy Smallman and the IBMT. More pictures, courtesy of Almudena Cros of the Asociación de los Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI), on Facebook here.
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(Versión en castellano.) On July 3 the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) became the first organization from the United States to join the Plataforma por la Comisión de la Verdad sobre los Crímenes del Franquismo (Platform for a Truth Commission on the Crimes of Francoism). As ALBA is entrusted to sustain and preserve the legacy...
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Dublin IBMT member Luke O’Riordan has posted a 1971 Irish TV programme (watch here) on his late grandfather, Irish International Brigader Michael O’Riordan (12 November 1917- 18 May 2006), a veteran of the 1938 Battle of the Ebro, whose 75th anniversary is being marked this year. Luke has also posted a recording of his recently...
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Supporters of the legendary International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War will gather in Jubilee Gardens in London’s South Bank from 12.30pm on Saturday 6 July. Next to the park’s International Brigade memorial they will commemorate the 2,500 volunteers from the British Isles who defended the Spanish Republic against Franco, Hitler and Mussolini between...
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Chela Scott Weber, associate head of the Tamiment Library, which houses the ALBA collection, writes in the NYU Libraries newsletter on a new donation, The Joseph North and Helen Oken North Papers: The North Papers span the 1910s through the 1960s, most of them from 1930 to 1960. Joseph North was a journalist who covered...
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Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! gets the latest news on Edward Snowden from Michael Ratner, an attorney to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, member of ALBA's Honorary Board, and president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional RightsRead more »
Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) was an American poet who happened to be in Spain in July 1936, covered the Civil War as a journalist, and would revisit it time and again in her later work. Her previously unpublished Spanish Civil War novel Savage Coast has just been released, edited by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein (see here for a sneak peek...
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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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