On July 23rd, Cuba lost an important leader and advocate for human rights, democracy, and freedom of expression. As Global Voices reports, Oswaldo Payá was killed in a car crash in the city of Bayamo. Internationally recognized as a proponent of non-violent protest, some of Payá's major achievements include having founded Cuba's Christian...
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Protests over the recent Mexican presidential elections have continued throughout the month of July. This past Friday, July 27th, another large-scale protest occurred, in which thousands of protestors blockaded the Televisa studios for 24 hours, demanding that Mexico's most popular television station "tell the truth." As The Guardian reports, "the protesters allege that...
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After the impeachment of the center-left Catholic Bishop Fernando Lugo from the presidency last month, Federico Franco, the new president of Paraguay, has taken some vast and controversial measures to open the country up to unregulated foreign investment. According to the Inter Press Service News Agency:
Franco named Jaime Ayala, the president of...
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To say it is difficult to be a union worker in Colombia would be a massive understatement. Ravaged by paramilitary violence and corrupt governments for almost 50 years, union workers in Colombia face unprecedented challenges; they are threatened and sometimes even killed for attempting to unionize and protect their rights. According to upsidedownworld.org,...
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Earlier this month, journalism mourned the death of the radical British journalist Alexander Cockburn, son of the journalist and Spanish Civil War veteran Claud Cockburn, aka Frank Pitcairn (1904-1981). Among the many obituaries, The Nation's Victor Navasky writes:
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In the wake of the untimely deaths of Alexander Cockburn and Michael Nash, we are sad to report the passing of John "Tito" Gerassi, author, journalist, historian, and son of Spanish Civil War veteran Fernando Gerassi, the last Republican commander of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War.
Gerassi received his MA at Columbia University...
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I have just heard the heartbreaking news of the death of Michael Nash, Director of the Tamiment Library and the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU. Over the years I had the good fortune of being able to work with Mike on a number of ALBA-related projects and on several occasions we co-taught...
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The brainchild of Englishman Rod Younger, Book4Spain offers Iberophiles one of the widest selections of books about Spain in the world.
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Patrick O'Connell not only led FC Barcelona to multiple victories, but allowed for half of the team to escape the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.
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The Canadian government recently opened a $2.5 million visitor's center in the house where Dr. Norman Bethune, the man who pioneered new medical techniques during the Spanish Civil War, was born.
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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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