The Associated Press reports: Chile’s president signed an anti-discrimination law on Thursday several months after the killing of a gay man beaten by attackers who carved swastikas into his body. The law was approved in May after being stuck in Congress for seven years. President Sebastián Piñera had urged lawmakers to speed its approval...
Read more »
In a recent exchange with a commenter on this blog, I mentioned how sometimes, when posting here, I feel like a hopeful child throwing a message in a bottle into the vast cybersea. And occasionally I experience the thrill of confirming that the message has arrived to an intended (if unknown) recipient. Those moments...
Read more »
The #YoSoy132 movement is broadening its scope beyond Mexico. On June 30th, many Mexican-Americans living in New York held a "symbolic vote" for Mexico's president in the city's Union Square. As the North American Congress on Latin America reports, the movement is focused on "the democratization of the country’s political system and the...
Read more »
The IBMT now has its own news area on YouTube. Our first video is an 18-minute film by Marshall Mateer on the June 2012 crossing of the Pyrenees by a group of enthusiasts from several countries to commemorate the international volunteers who joined the fight against fascism in Spain 75 years ago. View...
Read more »
A new exhibit in the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv focuses on the varied reactions of Jews in Palestine to the Spanish Civil War.
Read more »
Many readers young and old are familiar with Ernest Hemingway's classic novel, A Farewell to Arms. Few, however, may be completely aware of the painstaking revision Hemingway underwent in writing the ending to his famed novel, reworking its final lines at least 37 times before deciding on the final version. Now, 83 years the...
Read more »
The #YoSoy132 movement (coined by sensationalist pundits as "the Mexican Spring") was a crucial news story in the month of June. With Mexico's presidential election drawing near, the movement's criticism of Enrique Peña Nieto and unjust media coverage garnered much attention over the past month, attracting comparisons to both the Arab Spring and the...
Read more »
Come from Afar a novel by Gayla Reid, tells the story of a female Australian nurse who volunteers for the Spanish Relief Council during the Spanish Civil War.
Read more »
The poet Feerico Garcia Lorca is to be memorialized in an new opera by Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov premiering this month.
Read more »
The famous folk songs Red River Valley and Jarama Valley were recently featured in the HBO series Hemingway and Gellhorn, sung by Brooklyn (played by Eric Schneider). Brooklyn is, in a way, the spirit of Woody Guthrie: hopeful, innocent, idealistic like those young American men who went to Spain to fight fascism (among them...
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