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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Kate Doyle of the National Security Archives, winner of the 2012 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, reflects on the pursuit of justice in Guatemala in NACLA's new Report on the Americas--a special issue dedicated to "Central America: Legacies of War." Other contributors include Greg Grandin (who interviews Noam Chomsky),...
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Alan Warren notifies us of an upcoming event around 22 photographs of the retreats in Aragón, depicting American volunteers, for which research has been able to pinpoint the exact location where they were taken (text and announcement in Catalan, in pdf here):
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Severiano Montero, of the Association of Friends of the International Brigades (AABI), sends a report on recent commemorations and other events:
On February 27, we presented at the Ateneo de Madrid the Fanny Edelman's book "Rebelion militante". Jorge Grela, Vicente González and Miguel Pastrana glossed the human and political significance of this fighter for human...
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A former Guatemalan soldier has been convicted to more than 6,000 years in prison for his role in a massacre of more than 200 people during the Internal Conflict, the BBC reports. Yesterday, also for the BBC, Paula Dear covered the story of the country's quest for justice.
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Harry Belafonte, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, and Martin Sheen are among the members of the Honorary Committee inviting you to join us at the annual event in New York City honoring the volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade, commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Guernica bombing, and supporting the fight for human rights. Tickets for the event...
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Giles Tremlett, correspondent of The Guardian in Madrid, and author of Ghosts of Spain, reviews Paul Preston’s latest book about terrorism and its legacy in Franco’s Spain. “Franco had time to impose his own version of history, which still prevents contemporary Spain from “looking upon its recent violent past in an open and honest...
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The Biblioteca Afro-Americana Madrid (BAAM), directed by Mireia Sentís, has just published Spanish translations of James Yates' Spanish Civil War memoir From Mississippi to Madrid and a collection of Spanish dispatches from Langston Hughes. Xavier Montanyà reviews both of them in La Vanguardia (pdf):
Both books are of great interest to experts...
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Granito finally made it to Guatemala. The documentary by Pam Yates and Paco de Onís about the quest to indict the Guatemalan military responsible for massive murder during the Civil War, which ALBA screened at its Human Rights Film Festival last fall, and which features this year's winners of the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human...
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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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