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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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 /...
Read more »
"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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
Yesterday director Macarena Aguiló's documentary, entitled "The Chilean Building," premiered in New York City. The documentary focuses on an educational program called Project Home, which was created in the 1970s by members Chile's Revolutionary Left Movement and others who opposed the Pinochet regime. According to the New York Times, "these boys and girls...
Read more »
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 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.
The iconic group portrait of raggedy Lincoln Brigade volunteers that’s become ALBA’s calling card over the years is now finally available in an uncropped, high-res print. When and where was it taken? And who exactly are these 29 men?
Read more »
Tina Modotti and Vittorio Vidali, who dedicated a major part of their lives to the Communist International, have long been surrounded by myth. New research by the historian David Jorge suggests that they consistently strove for broad leftist fronts—even when the leadership of the Comintern favored other tactics.
Read more »
Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
Read more »
Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
Read more »
Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
Read more »
The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
Read more »
China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
Read more »
The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
Read more »
Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
Read more »
Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
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