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,...
Read more »
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:
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
The brainchild of Englishman Rod Younger, Book4Spain offers Iberophiles one of the widest selections of books about Spain in the world.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran Harry Fisher's friend and translator Ulrich Kolbe was recently interviewed by In Defense of Marxism journalist Karl Belin about the affects of the Spanish Civil War on Fisher's life.
Read more »
Judge Baltasar Garzón, winner of the 2011 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, will be joining the defense team of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks who, faced with extradition to Sweden, has sought refuge in the London embassy of Ecuador. Garzón will be working alongside Michael Ratner, of the Center for Constitutional...
Read more »
English tour-guide Nick Lloyd teaches tourists and Spaniards Spanish Civil War history, filling important gap in Barcelona's Spanish Civil War education.
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