"Witness," the BBC World Service radio show, commemorated the bombing of Guernica last week. Listen to the 9-minute program here. In Germany, Der Spiegel did the same.
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Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
"Witness," the BBC World Service radio show, commemorated the bombing of Guernica last week. Listen to the 9-minute program here. In Germany, Der Spiegel did the same.
Read more »
The Los Angeles Times is looking forward to HBO's upcoming film Hemingway & Gellhorn, by Philip Kauffman, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. The movie premiers on May 28. Trailer here.
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Writing in the Guardian, Fiona Maddocks reviews the Impossible Brilliance weekend dedicated to composer and Lincoln vet Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997):
A charismatic figure with a cult following, who fought in the Spanish civil war and then left anti-communist America to live in Mexico City, Nancarrow wrote most of his music for...
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In this video just uploaded by the Yiddish Book Center as part of the Wexler Oral History Project, Pauline Katz retells her grandfather's story about how Camp Kinderland taught about the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Each bunk was assigned "loyalist," except for her grandfather's, which had the misfortune of...
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This past April 26, our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust co-sponsored a wonderful event in London commemorating the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica. Gregg Macdonald's video of the event--which concludes a rousing musical homage to the Lincoln vets by David Rovics--can be viewed here, or below. The event...
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"Tens of thousands of people took to the streets here and around the United States Tuesday calling for an end to what they described as the mounting and corrosive influence of money in politics," CommonDreams reports. Len Tsou--Spanish Civil War expert, ALBA supporter, and photographer--joined the New York march with his camera. See...
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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Port Huron Statement, which was the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The PH Statement advocated for participatory democracy and helped launch the student movement of the 1960s. On April 12 and 13, a timely conference entitled “The Port Huron Statement...
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Friends & Family of the Lincoln Brigade will be gathering in NYC on May 11, 2012
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Lorna Scott Fox writes in the London Review of Books about the first criminal persecution in the massive scandal of stolen babies that began under Franco and continued into Spanish democracy:
According to lawyers for victim groups, as many as 350,000 babies were stolen from poor, single or left-wing mothers between 1938...
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On March 27, 1938, Avelino González Mallada, former mayor of the Asturian city of Gijón, died in a car crash on a country road in Woodstock, Virginia. The New York Times (p. 4) explained on the next day that “Señor Mallada was in this country on a sixty-day permit granted to him by the...
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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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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.
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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.
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After the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, the Seegers family did not hesitate to join the resistance. They had experience fighting fascism: their son Piet had fought for the Spanish Republic. When Tom King started digging into his family history seventy years later, he fell from one surprise into the other.
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Tina Modotti’s short life took her from Italy to North Beach and from there to Mexico, Berlin, Moscow, and civil-war Spain. Rightly known as a pathbreaking modernist photographer, she was also a radical activist. “Modotti spent the second part of her working life fighting for revolution.”
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Kirsten Weld has spent years studying Latin American dictatorships and the citizens who fight to hold them accountable. That experience has proven valuable in her current role as president of the AAUP chapter at Harvard, which, in March, sued the federal government for targeting students and faculty—and won.
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Targeted by the far right, Rutgers historian Mark Bray and his family went into exile in October. Speaking with The Volunteer from Madrid, he reflects on the current political situation. “Fascism shamelessly takes over institutions that, under liberal norms, are supposed to remain neutral.”
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I. In the Beginning Second child, Bernard, born March 1, 1915 Older brother, my father, Jacob (Jack), born June 3, 1912 Younger sister, Roslyn, born (June 1, 1922) disabled, hospitalized, died February 10, 1942 Their father, Abraham, died March 21,1930 Their mother, Nettie, died April 29, 1953 Bernie Brilliant student, graduated High...
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The title of this new occasional feature of The Volunteer is the Esperanto word for “archive.” In it, we will present, translate, and contextualize iconic non-English language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain.
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In recent years, citizen groups in Leipzig and Madrid have fought to preserve the buildings that were backdrops in two of Robert Capa’s best-known photographs. Their steadfast dedication has created two sites of historical memory whose significance extends far beyond Capa’s original images.
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On November 8, 1937, Salaria Kea, a 26-year-old African American nurse from Ohio, had been in Spain for seven months and one day. The country was in disarray. Half its territory was controlled by fascist rebels. Cities were being bombed, and civilians were killed by the thousands. Thousands more were forcibly displaced. But Kea...
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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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