A small but moving episode marked the regular annual meeting of the German organization Fighters and Friends of the Spanish Republic 1936-1939 (Kämpfer und Freunde der Spanischen Republik 1936-1939). It was the first such meeting without a single veteran; the last volunteer in Germany, Fritz Teppich, died last winter, and none of the tiny,...
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Check in with Democracy Now! for the latest coverage of the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street:
Occupy Wall Street protesters are converging in the Financial District in Manhattan to mark the first anniversary of the movement's beginning. Similar protests are taking place in dozens of cities today. On Sept. 17, 2011,...
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ALBA is now accepting nominations for the 2013 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. About the Award The ALBA-Puffin International Award for Human Rights Activism is granted on an annual basis to individuals or organizations whose work has had an exceptionally positive impact on the advancement and/or defense of human rights. The Award was established in 2011 to...
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A British archive has released a new virtual exhibition on Basque refugees in Carshalton, England during the Spanish civil war.
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Three more bodies have been recently exhumed with the help of a Canadian university student working with the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory to find the remains of Franco's victims.
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Trade Unionists in Scotland honor.
the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigades; remember lost comrades.
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In addition to marking the 11th anniversary of the more recent terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, today is also the 39th anniversary of General Augusto Pinochet's military coup in Chile, in which he forced a brutal, militaristic government upon the country. As the Associated Press reports, riots began earlier today, as...
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Yesterday Mexican leftist politician and presidential runner-up Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced his decision to leave the country's Democratic Revolution Party. As the New York Times reports, López Obrador "was one of many political figures who abandoned the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party in 1988 and was a popular Mexico City mayor before seeking...
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The words and deeds of the Lincoln Vets still Speak to a generation of present-day Spaniards. I received an email during the last week of August from Nacho Garcia, a young Spaniard from Burgos who maintains a blog, The Jaily News, named after the underground newspaper written by the International Brigade prisoners who...
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Helen Graham’s The War and Its Shadow, just out from Sussex Academic Press, is “a book concerned with what must now be considered the most important revisionist project in the study of world history, and that is the significance and truth of the Spanish Civil War”, writes Gary Raymond in the Wales Arts Review;...
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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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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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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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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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