The other day I was at the archives reading a letter from Veteran Sidney Rosenblatt to Estelle Katz. Sydney was writing about how the letters he received from home gave him the strength to carry on. His writing was beautiful and his story came alive as I held his letter in my...
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Dr. Josep Maria Massons Esplugas, former head of the surgical team for the International Brigades, passed away in Barcelona on November 10, 2012. Born in Valls (Tarragona, Catalonia) on January 18, 1913, he received his medical degree from the University of Barcelona in 1934 and went on to earn a surgical position at the...
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Today the Spanish press covers another success of the ARMH , which to date has carried out 153 exhumations of mass graves and recovered the remains of 1,330 victims of Francoist violence. Spain is second only to Cambodia in terms of the numbers...
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Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of three articles about the work of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), a grassroots Spanish organization helping the victims of Francoism in their pursuit of truth, justice and reparations. Click here for the second and third. In early January, El...
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Alan Warren writes: The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic by Henry Buckley is about to be published this April 30th by Tauris Publishing. This extraordinary book is a very rare find, since virtually the entire print run prior to distribution was destroyed during the London Blitz in 1940 and only a few...
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In part with a 50,000 euro Basque Spanish Civil War remembrance project, the bodies of approximately 100 Basque fighters are set to be exhumed this February.
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Alasdair Fotheringham, writing for the UK’s Independent, recalls the life of Harry Randall, the photographer and Lincoln Brigade veteran who passed away in late last year: Arriving in Spain on 1 July 1937, after a brief spell training with the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion –Canadian, but containing a large number of Americans – Randall was appointed head...
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Our friends from Fayón, Zaragoza, invite us to visit their newly inaugurate museum on "1938-- La Batalla del Ebro."
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David Lethbridge's new biography covering Dr. Norman Bethune's participation in the Spanish Civil War, Norman Bethune in Spain: Commitment, Crisis, and Conspiracy, published by Sussex Academic Press, is now available for pre-ordering.
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Dr. Moisès Broggi i Vallès, who passed away at age 104 on the last day of the year, was a renowned Catalan surgeon who during the Civil War headed up in the surgical unit serving the International Brigades. Politically active from an early age and almost until the very end, Dr. Broggi was a pacifist,...
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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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