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 Instituto Cervantes in New York alerts us to a terrific event to take place on April 12, at 7pm: "Tales from the Lincoln Brigade," a round table discussion to present the first books of the Biblioteca Afro-Americana de Madrid (African-American Library of Madrid, BAAM): the Spanish translations of Langston Hughes's dispatches from the Spanish Civil War,...
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Tampa, Florida was a sleepy town of just a few thousand inhabitants when, in 1885, the Spanish cigarmakers Vicente Martínez Ybor and Ignacio Haya decided to relocate their “clear Havana tobacco” cigar factories to the area from Key West. (They had relocated in 1869 from Havana to Key West to avoid both the high...
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Another somewhat unlikely focus of anti-fascist activism during the Spanish Civil War was Barre, Vermont. The town was home to a significant population of working class Spaniards most of whom had left their native region of Cantabria (Santander) during the first decades of the twentieth century to work in the granite quarries and stone...
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The 2007 museum show and catalog “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War” broke new ground by focusing on the way individuals and communities in New York city responded to the outbreak, conduct, and outcome of the Spanish Civil War. And while New York was a particularly active site for all kinds...
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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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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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Self-effacing and shy though he was, Dr. Edward Barsky’s experience in Spain made him an outspoken activist, tireless organizer, innovative frontline surgeon, and political prisoner. “Eddie is a saint,” Hemingway wrote. “That’s where we put our saints in this country—in jail.”
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The Volunteer is thrilled to honor Dr. Barsky on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
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For Edward Barsky, political and humanitarian activism were two sides of the same coin. Those who persecuted him begged to differ.
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The time she spent in civil-war Spain loomed large in the life of Martha Gellhorn, the St. Louis-born war journalist. “The truth is that Martha could not stop thinking, feeling, and writing about her Spanish experiences.” “Objectivity bullshit.” That’s what Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) called the journalism of her day. Her letters to personalities like...
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Among the thousands of Jewish volunteers who joined the International Brigades were many descendants of the Sephardim. What was it like for them to “return” to Spain? Three case studies: Lini de Vries, César Covo, and Samuel Nahman, aka Manny Harriman.
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How the 22-year-old Jewish American dancer Janet Riesenfeld performed flamenco to help raise money for the Second Republic under fascist attack.
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Why did Jawaharlal Nehru, future prime minister of India, visit civil-war Spain in 1938? As it turned out, the triangular relationship between Britain, Spain, and India had deep cultural and geopolitical implications.
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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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