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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Andrew Sullivan points to, and comments on, one of the more detailed and complex accounts of the precise relationship between the freshly appointed Pope Francis I and the Argentine military junta, provided by Democracy Now´s Amy Goodman in an interview with journalist Horacio Verbitsky. This is Sullivan; the quotes are from Goodman’s interview with...
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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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