A new play by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Nino Cruz pays tribute to Federico García Lorca, killed by fascist forces in the opening days of the Spanish Civil War.
Read more »
Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
A new play by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Nino Cruz pays tribute to Federico García Lorca, killed by fascist forces in the opening days of the Spanish Civil War.
Read more »
An Enigma machine used by Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War has been given to the British Bletchley Park Trust.
Read more »
Though the Spanish Civil War left many physical and mental scars on Guernica, some citizens attempt to move forward through art.
Read more »
A new plaque has been added to the Jubilee Gardens' International Brigade memorial statue by British International Brigade veteran David Lomon.
Read more »
Now online as part of the IBMT’s YouTube channel: a video report of the July 7 ceremony in Jubilee Gardens, London, to commemorate the 2,500 members of the International Brigades from Britain and Ireland. The footage includes images of Spanish Civil War veteran David Lomon, 93, unveiling a new plaque to honor the volunteers....
Read more »
Amy Goodman at Democracy Now!, on the lessons of the bombing:
Seventy-five years ago, the Spanish town of Guernica was bombed into rubble. The brutal act propelled one of the world’s greatest artists into a three-week painting frenzy. Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” starkly depicts the horrors of war, etched into the faces of...
Read more »
The photo show that I curated –La colonia: A photo album of Spanish immigrants in New York, 1898 – 1945– is currently on display in León, Spain, thanks to the city of León and the University of Washington, Seattle, which has a program and a site there. The show originally opened in New York,...
Read more »
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 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