Join the Burt Cohen show with guest, Prof. Sebastiaan Faber, as they discuss both the bombing and the painting; what it was and why it remains so important. PODCAST LINK
Read more »
Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
Join the Burt Cohen show with guest, Prof. Sebastiaan Faber, as they discuss both the bombing and the painting; what it was and why it remains so important. PODCAST LINK
Read more »
On the walls of the New Hampshire State House, there are numerous items meant to inspire visitors: a massive painting of a battle from America’s civil war, portraits of famous Granite Staters like Governor Gil Winant who, as ambassador to the court of St James, greatly helped sway American opinion toward supporting the British...
Read more »
ALBA is looking to expand its New York office staff with a part-time development/fundraising coordinator. The full job description is available here.
Read more »
Amador Fernández Savater was in New York last week to interview four Spaniards who have been involved with Occupy Wall Street. The piece has been published in two parts at eldiario.es: part 1, part 2.
Read more »
Sara Plaza and Edgardo Civallero, authors of the blog CivalleroYPlaza, have published an excellent Spanish translation of the conversation that Jim Fernández and I had with Helen Graham two years ago. Read it here.
Read more »
Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian who was born with the Russian Revolution and became a Communist in Nazi Germany, has died, age 95. Read his obituary in the Guardian, and an appreciation by Tristram Hunt. Hobsbawm, an antifascist if there ever was one, belonged to a generation of intellectuals deeply marked by...
Read more »
ALBA is still accepting nominations for the 2013 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. Deadline extended until October 15, 2012.
More information here.
Read more »
The Mexican Suitcase, a documentary by Trisha Ziff about the circuitous fate of the 4,500 negatives of Spanish Civil War photographs shot by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David "Chim" Seymour, will be available for viewing on iTunes on October 9. More details here.
Read more »
At a manifestation held today at the central Plaza del Sol in Madrid today, several thousand Spaniards--including lawyers, victims, family members, and public intellectuals--demanded the creation of a Truth Commission to properly deal with the unresolved judicial and human-rights legacy of the crimes against humanity committed during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco...
Read more »
The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, has several pamphlets and magazines related to American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War in its online collection. These open source documents provide access to materials normally accessible only within an archive. All of these items were published for fundraising and propaganda purposes and provide a view...
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