Alan Warren writes: An event at Quinto will be held over the weekend of August 31/ September 1, 2012 to commemorate the 75th anniversaries of the Battles of Quinto and Belchite. We look forward to meeting those keen to explore Purburrel Hill and the various locations of the Battle of Quinto aswell as the locations of...
Read more »
In a powerful op-ed in the New York Times today, filmmakers Michael Moore and Oliver Stone defend Julian Assange and warn against the consequences of a US attempt to prosecute the founder of Wikileaks:
If Mr. Assange is extradited to the United States, the consequences will reverberate for years around the world....
Read more »
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer staunchly defended her position as a stalwart of racism and bigotry in the United States' government this past week, signing into effect an "executive order instructing state officials to deny driver’s licenses and other benefits to young undocumented immigrants who are granted temporary legal status under a new federal program...
Read more »
The controversy regarding Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa's decision to grant asylum to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange this morning is growing at a rapid pace. According to The Guardian, Assange "took refuge in the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of sexual misconduct." Ecuadorian officials are...
Read more »
Yesterday young undocumented immigrants lined up across the country to wait for the opportunity to defer deportation. This event marks the official initiation of President Barack Obama's plan to allow some young undocumented immigrants to apply for reprieve, and could affect as many as 1.7 million people, reports the New York Times....
Read more »
In Colombia, former workers for GM with various work-related injuries and disabilities have gone on a hunger strike, literally sewing their lips shut until their demands for the company are met. The strike has seen growth and received significant media coverage over recent days, beginning with four strikers on August 1st, and expanding to...
Read more »
Since the mid-1990s, Canada has served as a safe refuge for asylum-seeking Mexicans. In recent years however, especially during the violent escalations of Mexico's Drug War, a conservative Canadian government has become increasingly skeptical of these asylum-seekers. As the North American Congress on Latin America reports, "Between the mid-1990s and 2009, almost 50,000...
Read more »
Last week over 200 Ch'ol Mayans from the Mexican State of Chiapas went by caravan to Mexico City's Supreme Court to demand their rights to communal lands, which are currently being denied by Chiapan state officials, upsidedownworld.org reports. As Upside Down World writes:
According to the Ch’ol, the Chiapan government has ignored and...
Read more »
In the introduction to the North American Congress on Latin America's summer report on the Americas, William I. Robinson discusses the current role of Latin America in what has over the past two decades become an increasingly globalized world economy. Writes Robinson of the "Walmartization" of Latin America, "the new face of global...
Read more »
No, a new film by Pablo Larraín on the 1988 referendum that ended the Pinochet dictatorship, premiered to great acclaim this week in Santiago de Chile, after winning the Art Cinema Award at Cannes in May. Based on a play by Antonio Skármeta (of Il Postino fame), and starring the Mexican actor Gael García...
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.
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
“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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
Read more »
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.
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