Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) has won the Mexican presidential election, beating out Andres Lopez Manuel Obrador of the Leftist Party with a plurality of 38 percent of the vote. The election of Peña Nieto signifies Mexico's frustration with the weak agenda of current president Felipe Calderrón of the PAN...
Read more »
It wasn’t until I began scanning the old crumbling panoramic photograph that I started to become suspicious. The image is spectacular: a large crowd of Spanish immigrants poses for a picture at some kind of picnic. The owner of the photo and several of the Spaniards I’ve been interviewing in Monterey told me that...
Read more »
This coming July 7, at 12:30pm, the International Brigade Memorial in London's Jubilee Gardens will serve as the gathering point for a commemorative event featuring speakers, poetry, and music. More information on the flier (pdf).
Read more »
I’m back in Monterey, California, following up on the story of the Spanish immigrants who settled in this area in the early decades of the 20th century. I’m constantly surprised both by the ubiquity of photographs, stories, and objects related to the Republic and the Spanish Civil War, and by the relative oblivion into...
Read more »
This past Tuesday, Jorge Rafael Videla, the ex Argentine dictator who ruled from 1976 to 1983, gave his final words in his court case regarding the theft of babies from pregnant women during the country's Dirty War. According to elpais.com, the 86 year-old Videla used this platform as a means for insulting the...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
As the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion slips from popular memory, one professor attempts to bring to light their tragic history in Spain.
Read more »
Like the Spanish Civil War, argues Pat Buchanan, the American governemnt should not send weapons or aide to Syria.
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.
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 »
Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
Read more »
Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
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