The Spring/Summer issue of International Brigade Memorial Trust newsletter is out, with articles on: the restoration of the London IB monument in preparation of the annual July 7 commemoration; the miraculous discovery of a protrait of veteran David Lomon, sketched in a prisoner-of-war camp; the annual Len Crome lecture delivered by ALBA's...
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Billy Bragg, the Bard Of Barking, has just cut a new album to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, Let the Jukebox Keep Playing reports; the CD features, among other SCW songs, "Jarama Valley."
The disc also features Maxine Peake, backed by Urban Roots dub ensemble, as she...
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Adam Hochshild reviews Paul Preston's monumental The Spanish Holocaust for the New York Times (read an excerpt from the book in The Volunteer; other reviews here and here):
An eminent and prolific British historian of modern Spain, Preston says this was “an extremely painful book to write.”...
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The Observer's Sean O'Hagan reviews the translation of Susana Fortes's novelized version of the love affair between Spanish Civil War photographers Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, the film rights for which have been bought by Michael Mann:
Fortes's short novel is essentially a historical romance that concentrates on the relationship between...
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The electronic artist Grey Filastine connects efforts in Spain and Indonesia to confront a dictatorial past and achieve justice in the present, the Jakarta Globe reports:
“They’re excavating the mass graves, they’re going through the political process of changing the history books, of removing big statues of Franco, like all...
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A plaque has been unveiled in Sussex to commemorate the 4,000 Basque children brought to the county 75 years ago, the BBC reports:
The children were escaping the Spanish Civil War, and arrived on a ship from Bilbao. The ceremony took place in Blackboys, near Uckfield, where 20 children and...
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The work done by ALBA/Puffin Award winner Fredy Peccerelli and his team is absolutely essential, says his colleague José Suasnavar of the Guatemalan Association of Forensic Anthropology (FAFG), EFE reports In an interview with the prestigious Latin American academic institution FLACSO, Suasnavar describes the Guatemalan exhumation process in detail. Read it
Jefferson Morley writes in Salon:
Kate Doyle’s job isn’t exactly journalism, though she’s nailed more big stories than many Pulitzer Prize winners. Her work does not quite qualify as law enforcement either, though a few bad guys living in confined quarters rue the day she came into their lives. “Human rights detective”...
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Lisa Mullens interviewed ALBA/Puffin Award winner Doyle on the Public Radio International program The World. Doyle discusses her work in Guatemala and Peru. You can listen to the full hour-long program, or just the interview with Kate, titled “Documenting Latin America’s Painful Past.” “Yes, it is scary to go up against human rights criminals," Doyle tells...
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Richard Bermack's photographs of the 2012 ALBA celebration in New York, including the ALBA/Puffin Award ceremony and the reception, can be viewed 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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