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...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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,...
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In a long interview with ElDiario.es, Baltasar Garzón, winner of the 2011 ALBA/Puffin Award, talks about the many commitments he has taken on since his disbarment two years ago, while denouncing the policies of Spain's current government and the persecution of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange, whom he represents. Read the whole interview
Dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was ousted through a referendum in 1988, contemplated what would in effect have been a second coup, the AP reports based on documents published by the National Security Archive, whose senior analyst Kate Doyle received the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism last year:
The formerly...
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“George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia 75 years on”: Len Crome Memorial Lecture, organized by the International Brigade Memorial Trust. Saturday 2 March 2013 at the Manchester Conference Centre, Sackville Street, Manchester M1 3BB, 11am-5pm. To mark this year’s 75th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’, the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT)...
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On Sunday, Feb. 17, despite chilly and windy weather, 50,000 people converged to Washington, DC demanding that President Obama block the Keystone XL pipeline and take action against climate change.
You can view photos here.
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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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