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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David Schwittek has just put up the 15-minute video summary of the ALBA's 2012 New York City celebration, held on May 13, including the ceremony for the 2012 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, given to Kate Doyle and Fredy Peccerelli. Watch the video 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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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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