This coming fall, many renowned Spanish liberals and intellectuals will be promoting and celebrating a so-called Conference of Writers, Intellectuals, and Artists for the Compromise. The conference is set to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the "legendary Second International Writers' Conference for the Defense of Culture, which in the summer of 1937 met...
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With Mexico’s presidential election less than a week away, none of the candidates have firmly established their policies regarding Mexico’s Drug War, and have avoided divulging how they plan to combat the narco traffickers and cartels that have turned large areas of the country into violent warzones. The escalation of drug-related violence in the...
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The United States' federal judiciary is turning its back on constitutionality. With the emergence of several legal cases involving the complicity of the United States in tortures and disappearances that have occurred over the past decade, it is becoming increasingly evident that our justice system is corrupt. According to writer Scott Horton of...
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As the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion slips from popular memory, one professor attempts to bring to light their tragic history in Spain.
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Like the Spanish Civil War, argues Pat Buchanan, the American governemnt should not send weapons or aide to Syria.
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An article in 'The National Interest' debates the merit of a new Lincoln Brigade for Syria.
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The Royal Spanish Academy of Language has announced it will revise the official definition of the word "marriage" in the DRAE (Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary). This change will mark the first time the DRAE recognizes marriage as more than the union of two opposite-sex partners, reports elpais.com. The new definition will include the...
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I had the pleasure of visiting the ALBA archives a couple of weeks ago with Alan Levine, a New York-based civil rights attorney with a longstanding interest in the Lincolns. In the early 1960s, fresh out of Yale Law School, Alan took a job on Wall Street, a decision which he soon regretted. In...
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Last Friday, June 15th, President Obama announced that his administration would stop deporting young undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as children, if they meet certain criteria. While the President acknowledged that this was not a "permanent fix" to the deportation issues that have only been exacerbated under his presidency, his action, "effective...
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The uruguayan government has announced its decision to control the means of production and distribution of marijuana, making it the first country in Latin America to do so. The goal of this measure is to combat drastic consumption and narcotrafficking in a drug war that, according to politician Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro, "has already been...
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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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