Ten men were arrested by Spanish police officers on the suspicion of illegally possessing war weapons, in addition to an array of vintage firearms from the Spanish Civil War and World War II.
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An article last month about the fate of veterans who fought with the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion by Canadian author Terrence Rundle West has spurred new discussion over whether the Mac-Paps should be honored in Remembrance Day celebrations or if their cause is unworthy of remembrance as they traveled to Spain against the direct wishes...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigades Archives celebrated the Brigade's 76th anniversary last Sunday in Berkeley, California by honoring Lincoln Brigader Delmer Berg, and activists Kate Doyle and Fredy Peccerelli.
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In this 1983 interview with Martha Gellhorn, the renowned journalist, novelist, and war correspondent discusses in great length her views regarding the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Vietnam War, among other human rights-threatening historical events. Throughout the nearly half-hour long conversation, Gellhorn staunchly lambasts the idiocy of...
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Canción Gitana, an international flamenco dance company, will present a distinctive take on the life of legendary Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, reports sussexexpress.co.uk. The dance-biography will feature myriad narrators, guitarists, and dancers and will cover the entire scope of Lorca's life, from birth to his tragic assassination by the Phalangists, all in...
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Is the violent dictatorial conflict in Syria comparable to that of Spain in the 1930s? Over the past week a number of opinions regarding this subject matter have been published on the Internet, including that of international affairs expert Barry Rubin. Stated Rubin in a recent blog post:
In several respects, the Syrian civil...
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Yvonne Scholten, biographer of the Dutch miliciana Fanny Schoonheyt, are interested in obtaining information on the Dutch Lincoln Brigade volunteer Bart van der Schelling. He was admired as a baritone–he recorded Songs of the Spanish Civil War, a number of them with Pete Seeger. In later life he acquired a reputation as a primitive painter. He and...
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John Hanc tells the moving story of a nephew discovering the story of his uncle, Louis Stoloff, who left his home on the Lower East Side to die fighting fascism in Spain:
When Stoloff left New York City, he was 27, the median age of the 2,800 Americans who went to fight....
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On Start the Week Andrew Marr discusses Spain’s economic crisis, and the legacy of Franco. In the last decade Spain has begun to unearth some of the mass graves of the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed in the 1930s by both sides in the civil war. Paul Preston discusses what he...
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Richard Bermack and Jeannette Ferrary have shared their photographs of the 2012 ALBA celebration in the San Francisco Bay Area. See a slideshow here.
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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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