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.
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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...
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ALBA is still accepting nominations for the 2013 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. Deadline extended until October 15, 2012.
More information here.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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Yesterday, thousands of protesters expressed their indignation and dissatisfaction with the current government–and the political class as a whole–by peacefully surrounding the Spanish parliament in Madrid. Protests continue unabated today; follow events live on MásPúblico. Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! have the details on the events of yesterday: Thousands of people surrounded the Spanish...
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The work of Conlon Nancarrow, experimentalist composer and Lincoln Brigade veteran, will be featured in an extensive program at UC Berkeley to mark the fact that he was born 100 years ago. Details here, tickets here, highlights below: Join us for Nancarrow at 100, a three-day centennial celebration honoring the life and work of...
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This past Friday, the United States' Justice Department disclosed the names of 55 individuals who are currently being detained at Guantánamo Bay, approving them to be transfered to other countries. According to the New York Times, "the government’s move has no immediate, practical effect on the inmates’ detention," and "inclusion on the list...
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Hershl Hartman writes: IB fighters remembered in Secular Yom Kippur program Since 1973, progressive Secular/cultural Jews — including many intercultural families — in Los Angeles have marked yonkiper/Yom Kippur (day of purgation/atonement) in an alternative observance in which personal reflections are combined with social concerns, and poetry replaces prayer. Reflecting our general anti-fascist heritage...
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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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