Our friends from the UK write: We are sad to report the sudden death of David Lomon, the last known survivor in Britain of the more than 2,500 volunteers from the British Isles who joined the International Brigades. He died this morning (21 December 2012), aged 94, after being taken to hospital overnight. David...
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Spanish Civil War veteran Jim Benét, who passed away earlier this week, “drank several times alongside writer Ernest Hemingway,” Brett Wilkison writes for the Press Democrat: He forged his own path as a respected newspaper and TV reporter in the Bay Area, covering the Free Speech movement on the UC Berkeley campus in the...
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We just received the sad news that Jim Benét, journalist and veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, passed away this weekend in Santa Rosa, California. This past August he was interviewed for Public Radio International; in July, he spoke with Nadya Williams for a piece in the Volunteer.
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Sad news from Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study: Albert Hirschman, German-born brilliant scholar and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, passed away at the age of 97. From the IAS website: Renowned social scientist Albert O. Hirschman, whose highly influential work in economics and politics in developing countries has had a profound impact on economic...
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The fascist salute rears its ugly head in Madrid once more on the 37th anniversary of Franco's death.
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Victor Grossman in Berlin writes to report sad news: the death, earlier this month, of German IB veteran Adolphe Low, who was granted French citizenship in 1945 and remained in France. He was the last of the German International Brigade veterans. Adolphe Low was born as Adolf Löw in Cottbus, south of Berlin, in...
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The latest issue of Hollywood Reporter is dedicated to the blacklist, and includes in addition to several articles a five-minute video with interviews. Among those blacklisted, the “Hollywood Ten,” was Lincoln Brigade veteran Alvah Bessie.
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Is there a military family of the Spanish Civil War, and of the International Brigades in particular? Until November 11, 2012, I had never asked myself, or anyone else, that question. And the odds were against my doing so, not the least because “military family” and “Spanish Civil War” are words that are not...
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ALBA’s annual Online Fundraising Acution will be held from November 26 until December 11, 2012. Featuing, among many other items: Artwork and photographs including several painting by Dutch Volunteer, Bart Van der Schelling; Photographs by Sofia Moro; Rare, collectible Architects for Social Responsibility poster Rare books and journals pertaining to the Brigades such as a limited...
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We know, of course, that he gave his talent as a writer to support the Republican side.
But there are at least two additional things Hemingway did that have attracted little attention.
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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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