This past March 23, Vernon Bown, one of the last surviving US volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, passed away at the Veteran’s Administration Rehabilitation Center in Martinez, California. Vern Bown grew up in North-Western Wisconsin. After serving in Spain he joined the Merchant Marine during World War II. In the 1950s, he was...
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The British children's writer Leila Berg, who died late last month, was a staunch supporter of the Spanish Republic, Rosemary Stones writes in The Guardian. Two of her lovers dies fighting in the International Brigades. Read the full obituary here.
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Rob García, whose father was a Basque Republican child refugee in the UK, announces a series of events to commemorate the Guernica bombing and the evacuation of 4,000 Basque children to Great Britain, to be performed by the Na-mara duet ( Paul McNamara and García himself). More details here.
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John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco, at Dissident Voice, recalls Langston Hughes' poem "Barcelona Air Raid" in relation to the increased use by the US administration of unmanned drones:
In targeting non-state individuals, questions of human rights and rightful protections readily present themselves. They center on uncovering the criteria that deem certain individuals...
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May Franco be called a "dictator" after all? Público reports on a new chapter in the ongoing saga around the controversial Diccionario Biográfico Español whose first 25 volumes were issued a year ago by the Spanish Royal Academy of History: The commission appointed to investigate the case has recommended that an appendix...
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"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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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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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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The iconic group portrait of raggedy Lincoln Brigade volunteers that’s become ALBA’s calling card over the years is now finally available in an uncropped, high-res print. When and where was it taken? And who exactly are these 29 men?
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Tina Modotti and Vittorio Vidali, who dedicated a major part of their lives to the Communist International, have long been surrounded by myth. New research by the historian David Jorge suggests that they consistently strove for broad leftist fronts—even when the leadership of the Comintern favored other tactics.
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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
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Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
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Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
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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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