Norman Markowitz, writing for People's World, mourns the death of his long-time friend Mike Nash, the director of the Tamiment Library who passed away unexpectedly late last month:
The son of New York City school teachers - his father a victim of the post World War II firings and blacklisting, his mother a trade...
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Today from 3:00-4:00 p.m. WNYC AM 820 aired an interview with Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran James Benet. The interview was aired as a segment of PRI's "The World". Read and listen to the program here.
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In an op-ed for The Guardian, Michael Ratner wrote yesterday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whom he represents, is right to fear prosecution in the United States once he has been indicted from the United Kingdom to Sweden in relation to a case of alleged sexual misconduct. "There are several unambiguous signs that...
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For the past three years, the Colombian insurgency has been taking an increasing amount of control of the country's civil war. Despite the implementation of the 7 billion dollar Colombia Plan (a plan designed to bolster the state and resist the insurgency) by the United States in 2000, the North American Congress on Latin...
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The current issue of The Nation, guest-edited by Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive, investigates the impact in Latin America of Cablegate, the biggest leak of documents in US history. With contributions by Kornbluh (Latin America After Cablegate: What Changed?), Blanche Petrich Moreno (WikiLeaks and the War...
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According to upsidedownworld.org, last week a Mexican official told the news site Al Jazeera that the United States' Central Intelligence Agency does not do their job in assisting Mexico in their Drug War. The spokesman, who works for the Chihuahua state government argued that instead, the CIA actually manages the war. While many...
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Mining is one of the most pressing political issues in many Latin American countries, from Guatemala, to El Salvador, to Peru. In each country, mining can almost always be traced to governmental corruption. Peru is no exception. BBC News reports that, whereas President Ollanta Humala campaigned on the promise the elimination of poverty...
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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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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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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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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