An excellent post at the NYRblog by human-rights leader Aryeh Neier about the unprecedented prosecution of Guatemala’s former head of state: …the prosecution of General Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala, now eighty-six years old, stands out in at least one respect. For the first time, a former head of state is being tried for...
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On Sunday, participants in Argentina’s National Day of Memory march stretched the whole length of the Avenida de Mayo—from the Congressional Plaza to the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the presidential palace. That’s a distance of almost two kilometers. They came together to commemorate March 24, 1976, when the military overthrew a democratically-elected...
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Executive Producers Jeanne Houck (ALBA Board Member) & Michele Fillion (EP and director) announce the TV broadcast premiere of “No Job for A Woman”: The Women Who Fought to Report WWII on PBS World Channel starting March 20th. Before World War II, war reporting was considered NO JOB FOR A WOMAN. But when American...
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Here is the invitation for ALBA's annual event in New York City (download as pdf; order tickets online):
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"Republican opposition to legalizing the status of millions of illegal immigrants is crumbling" among leading Republicans, Ashley Parker and Michael Shear write in the NY Times: "leading lawmakers in the party scramble to halt eroding support among Hispanic voters — a shift that is providing strong momentum for an...
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Clancy Sigal writes to the London Review of Books in response to Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s review of Richard Baxell's Unlikely Warriors:
The drift of Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s piece about the Spanish Civil War is that it was ‘one wake-up call after another’, in which the untrained, poorly armed volunteers had their optimism shattered by...
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Our friends at SkyLight Pictures are writing with exciting news: The long awaited trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt begins today, March 19, 2012. The brutal Guatemalan dictator will be the first head of state to be tried for genocide in genuine proceedings in his own country’s justice system. Ríos Montt and another ex-General, José Mauricio Rodríguez...
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History is being written in Guatemala as former military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt is being put on trial for crimes against humanity and genocide. The New York Times' Elizabeth Malkin covers the latest developments today in a long story:
Guatemala’s justice system has begun a transformation. In a show of political will,...
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Moscow’s-Spanish Center–a sanctuary for the Spanish Civil War refugee community in the former USSR–needs your help! The Center was created in 1966 as a voluntary organization with strong ties to the Communist Parties of the USSR and Spain. Over the years and decades, it has come to be a second home for the nearly...
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We just received the sad news that Spanish Civil War veteran George Sossenko has passed away. Born in Russia, George left his parent’s home in Paris, France, at age 17 to join those fighting against Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. He initially went to the offices of the French Communist...
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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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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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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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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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