A new 154-page report issued by Human Rights Watch details new cases of torture committed by US government representatives. From the press release:
The United States government during the Bush administration tortured opponents of Muammar Gaddafi, then transferred them to mistreatment in Libya, according to accounts by former detainees and recently uncovered...
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From our friends at NACLA: Today, members of the Mexican Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, led by journalist Javier Sicilia, arrived in New York City. The Caravan for Peace has spent the past month traveling across the United States in protest of failed drug war policies. During its visit, the Caravan and its...
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From September 21-29, British director Matt Richard's new film, entitled "To Say Goodbye," will premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival, in San Sebastian, Spain. According to El Público, the animated film tells the story of "4,000 Basque children who set sail on the Habana ship en route to the United Kingdom" during...
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An audio reportage courtesy of Free Speech Radio (listen here): Over the last few years, Europe has experienced a severe financial crisis, with countries like Greece and Spain facing skyrocketing debt and unemployment. More than a decade ago, a similar situation was unfolding in Argentina. In 2001, the country suffered a debilitating economic crisis...
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“Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called for Tony Blair and George Bush to be hauled before the international criminal court in The Hague,” The Guardian reports, “and delivered a damning critique of the physical and moral devastation caused by the Iraq war”: “The then leaders of the United States and Great Britain,” Tutu argues, “fabricated...
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The Spanish on-line paper El Plural is reporting a rather shocking story from Madrid. “The State Secretariat of Information has decided that the news conference planned for next week by the Circle of Foreign Correspondents in Spain with former judge Baltasar Garzón “is not appropriate” (“no es idóneo”), and it has denied permission for...
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In the face of "falling popularity" and "economic crisis," state television in Spain will begin to air bullfighting after a six-year hiatus, reports the New York Times. This change in policy comes via the conservative Popular Party government, which, unlike many animal rights groups in Spain today, is staunchly pro-bullfighting, and opposes animal...
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Mexico's highest election court has rejected election runner-up Andrés Manuel López Obrador's legal challenge to overturn the results of the Mexican presidential election, which Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI party won on July 1st. Shortly following the election, López Obrador accused Peña Nieto of having "engaged in widespread vote-buying and campaign overspending...
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In his massive novel La noche de los tiempos, Antonio Muñoz Molina crafts an unforgettable fictional character named Judith Biely. The daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Judith grew up in New York, did doctoral work in Spanish Literature at Columbia, and traveled to Spain in the early 1930s to conduct doctoral research. In...
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You are invited to a celebration of the life of Dr. Michael H. Nash Head of Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives Please join Jeanne Nash, sons Raphael and Gabriel, and Mike’s friends and colleagues for a program of reminiscence and appreciation. Light refreshments to follow. Friday, September 28th, 2012 5:30pm to...
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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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