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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This summer in Chile a group of volunteers has gained notoriety for their documentation of the illegal police activity demonstrated in student protests across the country. The group, which calls itself the "helmets" (members wear blue or white helmets when covering protests), consists of "ordinary citizens of all ages and walks of life, professionals...
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This past week at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, Republicans have made it an essencial goal to finalize a party platform on the issue of immigration. Whereas Mitt Romney has softened his stance towards undocumented immigrants over the past few months (claiming that he would "consider" passing a Dream Act for undocumented...
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This past Wednesday, authorities in Mexico announced that a group of captured criminals confessed to the killings of five journalists in the state of Veracruz earlier this year, reports the New York Times. One criminal admitted to committing an astounding 36 crimes alone. While this initially may seem like a crucial development, human...
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Earlier this week, hundreds of unemployed farmworkers occupied an empty estate in Hornachuelos, Spain (just miles outside of Seville) to protest the way the high rate of joblessness has been handled in Spain during their economic crisis. According to the New York Times:
The resentment here over land that has been left uncultivated at...
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The New York Police Department's decade-long surveillance program targeting Muslim communities is "reminiscent of the logic behind the country's shameful World War II experience in racial profiling, the roundup of citizens of Japanese descent," Alan Levine of Latino Justice writes in the National Law Journal. Levine argues that the program does not pass...
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A century-old Jesus fresco, entitled "Ecce Homo," was defiled in a Roman Catholic church in Borja, Spain this past week. The person responsible for such sacrilege? Eighty year-old Cecilia Giménez. According to the New York Times, "the authorities in Borja said they had suspected vandalism at first, but then determined that the shocking...
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Earlier this year, a group of musicians from the Conservatory of Navarra and CTL School of Image and Sound set out to make a unique piece of music. At 24 minutes long, the piece (written for voice, alto saxophone, and percussion) is a sprawling exploration of, as the group puts it, "composition, performance /...
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"A judge ordered the arrest on Tuesday of eight retired police and military officers in connection with the kidnapping and disappearance of Boris Weisfeiler, an American university professor who disappeared while hiking in Chile in 1985," Pascale Bonnefoy reports in the New York Times,
Mr. Weisfeiler, then 43, was the only United...
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In a glowing review in the New York Times, writer Dwight Garner praises the newly published 'Diaries,' by George Orwell for exposing a more personal side of the legendary essayist, novelist, and social commentator. As Garner writes:
Among the vivifying things about his “Diaries,” issued now in one volume for the first time,...
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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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