Democracy Now covers the historic trial targeting the infamous Operación Cóndor, through which right-wing Latin American dictatorships coordinate the repression of dissent.
Read more »
Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Democracy Now covers the historic trial targeting the infamous Operación Cóndor, through which right-wing Latin American dictatorships coordinate the repression of dissent.
Read more »
This past February I received a call from the Ateneo in Madrid—a long-standing cultural institution—asking for a brief presentation about some aspect of the Second Republic for the weekly Monday gathering of a group of Republicans, many of whom lived the years of the Civil War and postwar personally. The five years of the...
Read more »
Emilio Silva Faba was born in the town of Pereje (León) in 1892. In 1915 he emigrated to Argentina, where he lived in Ezpeleta, in the province of Buenos Aires. There he worked in a soda factory. Five years later he re-emigrated to the United States. He came through Ellis Island on August 28...
Read more »
Marjorie Cohn, who teaches at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and gave ALBA's 2011 Susman lecture, underscores the "uncommon courage" of Bradley Manning in a column on Portside.
Read more »
Amy Goodman's Democracy Now spoke with Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, ALBA honorary board member, and defense counsel for Julian Assange in the United States, about the Bradley Manning case, the pretrial hearing of which Ratner attended:
For the first time, 25-year-old U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning has...
Read more »
Nacho García serves on the Burgos Committee to Honor the International Brigades that is attempting to to install a monument to the Brigades on the grounds of San Pedro de Cardeña, the site of the former concentration camp. He reports here that, after a long delay, the local authorities have turned down requests...
Read more »
This is the story of my service in the Spanish Civil War during the years 1937 and 1938 as a soldier in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the 15th Brigade of the International Brigades.
Read more »
Aaron Shulman, who moved to Spain a couple of years ago, compares his happy personal life with the stunningly desolate social and economic landscape around him:
To say that unemployment is bad in Spain is like saying that the sea is watery. The situation is that oceanically obvious. Since the Read more »
Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards took to the streets in 16 Spanish cities on Saturday Feb. 23 to protest against austerity and demand true democracy. They were chanting “You got envelopes, we got cuts!”
Check out El Pais coverage and photos here.
Read more »
Alan Warren writes announcing two 75th Anniversary events concerning the XV Brigade and the Great Retreats, to be held on March 30-31. Saturday 30th March 2013: The 75th anniversary March to remember the Retreat of the Lincoln Washington battalion between March 31st and April 2nd 1938 and the death of, among many others, Robert Merriman,...
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.
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
“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...
Read more »
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.
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