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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Last week the 1929 Picasso painting, mujer en sofá rojo was vandalized at the Menil Collection of Houston, Texas. The vandal approached the painting unhindered and spray painted the figure of a bull with the word "conquered" below it, reported elpais.com. Fortunately, the museum houses a conservation laboratory and the painting was salvaged...
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The Vatican will consider taking punitive actions against bishop Fernando María Bargalló after videos and photographs showing him embracing a woman and displaying flirtatious behavior were distributed by various argentine media outlets. Despite the photographic content, Bargalló insisted that the woman he had been seen with was a childhood friend, reported elpais.com. In...
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An appeals court on Tuesday ordered the government to investigate the 1976 assassination of an American by Chilean police secret agents in Washington, the AP reports:
The American, Ronni Moffitt, was an assistant to Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean cabinet minister and a leading critic of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator....
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The Supreme Court in Madrid has denied an appeal from the Fundación Francisco Franco to relocate a statue of Franco on horseback to its original location in the La Plaza de San Juan de la Cruz. The statue was removed from the plaza in 2005 by the Ministry of Development. According to elpais.com,...
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This year marks the 75th anniversary of the evacuation of 4,000 children from Spain by sea to the United Kingdom. A broadcast at 11:00pm on Monday, June 18th (tonight) on bbc.co.uk told the "heart-warming story of how British people welcomed the Spanish children, and strived to make a difference during [the Spanish...
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En español aquí. 1937. A picnic in Toro Park, 9 miles from Monterey, California. Several hundred Spaniards from the Monterey Peninsula and the Santa Clara Valley enjoy a pleasurable get-together. But the raised clenched fists remind us that a war is going on in Spain, and that this social gathering 6,000 miles away in...
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While Spain continues to struggle economically, the country has one constant with which its citizens can be proud to identify: soccer. This was not always the case, however. In his new book, entitled La Roja: How Soccer Conquered Spain and How Spanish Soccer Conquered the World, writer Jimmy Burns explores the history of soccer...
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Documents from the planned 1936 'Spanish Olympiad' have now been digitized and published by the University of Warwick.
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A new film based on the novel Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes will be directed by Michael Mann, who has directed other films such as Public Enemies, and Heat.
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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
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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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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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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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