Judge Baltasar Garzón, whose career was terminated recently by the Spanish Supreme Court, received a standing ovation from Argentina's Congress as President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner thanked him, on behalf of "millions of Argentines," for his groundbreaking work in defense of human rights (video here.) Garzón's disbarment, President Kirchner said, is "an offense...
Read more »
Within a couple of days' time, the last surviving German and Scottish volunteers of the Spanish Civil War, Fritz Teppich and Thomas Watters, passed away. Victor Grossman sends us a note on Teppich (below); an obit from Neues Deutschland is here (in German). A BBC obit for Watters is here; a brief...
Read more »
In an ostensible attempt to save face, the Spanish Supreme Court absolved Judge Baltasar Garzón yesterday from "prevarication," or knowingly making a decision against the law, in relation to Garzón's opening of an investigation into crimes against humanity committed by the Franco regime during and after the Spanish Civil War (NYTimes, Guardian)....
Read more »
ALBA's James D. Fernández is interviewed by the Spanish press about the baffling court case around Garzón's stay as holder of NYU's King Juan Carlos I Chair. The case was eventually closed. Read the interview here (in Spanish).
Read more »
The online magazine FronteraD just published a polemical review (in Spanish) by me of a David Rieff's polemical book Against Remembrance. Read it here.
Read more »
James D. Fernández, vice-chair of ALBA and professor of Spanish at NYU, has an op-ed in today's El País commenting on some of the more Kafkaesque chapters of the witch-hunt against Judge Garzón--and the collateral damage inflicted on those who found themselves in the crossfire. Read the piece here.
Read more »
ALBA is proud to announce its 2012 teaching institutes for high school teachers, made possible by the Puffin Foundation and donors like you: March 17, 2012: Professional development day in Seattle, co-hosted by the Center for Spanish Studies and the Division of Spanish and Portuguese of the University of Washington, with Anthony Geist, Peter Carroll,...
Read more »
Rickard Jorgensen, who has generously supported the development of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade collection at NYU's Tamiment library, writes:
After much work by Mike Nash, Gail Malmgreen, Elizabeth Compa, Evan Daniel, Laura Helton, Julie Kessle, Porsche Martin and Jessica Weglein, the "Randall: Fifteenth International Brigade Photograph Collection" and the "Photograph International Brigades...
Read more »
The Basque city of Gernika will be commemorating the 75th anniversary of the April 26, 1937 bombing during the Spanish Civil War with a series of events starting this month. See the full program here (pdf).
Read more »
The historian Ronald Fraser, author Blood of Spain, has died in Spain, where he lived. Blood of Spain, Tariq Ali writes in The Guardian, "is a peerless account of the Spanish civil war, carefully constructed from interviews with participants on both sides":
Conducted with a steady and consistently courteous voice, the...
Read more »
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
Read more »
Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
Read more »
As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
Read more »
Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
Read more »
The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
Read more »
Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
Read more »
Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
Read more »
The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
Read more »
“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
Read more »
Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
Read more »
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
Search the Database