The conservative government of Chile is “backing off a plan to remove the word “dictatorship” from school textbooks in reference to the government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet,” the Associated Press reports: President Sebastián Piñera’s new education minister, Harald Beyer, started a political uproar when he discussed the plan on Wednesday, which was publicized in...
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IPS news reports:
This month, federal judge María Servini asked Spain for information on Spanish military officials, as part of a new investigation based on a lawsuit filed in April 2010 by human rights lawyers in Argentina in the name of relatives of victims of the...
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Jeremy O. Simer sends a touching note: A couple of months ago, my friend Lonnie Nelson called from Seattle to ask me to help her arrange for someone in Gandesa (Tarragona) to lay flowers there in memory of her uncle Kenneth Frederick Nelson, who died in combat there in 1938, at the age of...
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Televisión Española, in last night's news program, covered the exhibit of Spanish Civil War photographer Agustí Centelles that ALBA has co-sponsored, and which is still up at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center. See the segment here.
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In the 1930s, Margaret Palmer was an American expat living in Spain, and working as a local agent for the Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art. She also was in charge of the Spanish section of the Carnegie’s annual International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting from 1923-38. In the “Archives of American Art Journal” (26:2-3, 1986)*,...
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Diana Anhalt (author of A Gathering of Fugitives, American Political Expatriates in Mexico, 1948-1965), and Yvonne Scholten, biographer of the Dutch miliciana Fanny Schoonheyt, are interested in obtaining information on the Dutch Lincoln Brigade volunteer Bart van der Schelling. He was admired as a baritone--he recorded Songs of the Spanish Civil War, a...
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The parallelisms between the boom-and-bust of the 1920s/30s and our current economic and political meltdown are ubiquitous and uncanny (eg, here and here). These unsettling coincidences form the knot of “Wearing Lorca’s Bowtie,” a wonderful production that will run at the Duke Theater on 42nd Street until December 17, 2011. The great Spanish poet and...
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Trisha Ziff's documentary Mexican Suitcase (review, trailer, website) has been one of thirty feature-length films to be nominated for an Ariel, the Mexican equivalent of the Oscar, Cinemanía reports. The most prestigious film award in the Mexican movie industry, the Ariel has been awarded annually since 1947.
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Agustí Centelles (1909-1985) is one of the most important photojournalists of the Spanish Civil War, and his work should be studied alongside that of Robert Capa, David Seymour, Gerda Taro, Hans Namuth, and Georg Reisner. This much is clear in the wake of the successful exhibit Centelles in_edit_¡oh!, which has been on show...
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On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the International Brigades, ALBA is organizing a get-together on December 9 and a silent auction to benefit the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.
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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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In the spring of 2024, while cleaning up an old family home, Kate Fogarty came across the typescript of a play about the Lincoln Brigade written by her grandfather, Charlie Nusser, who served in Spain from February to October 1937 and fought in the US Army during the Second World War. Ten months after...
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In this new occasional feature of The Volunteer, whose title is the Esperanto word for “archive,” we will present, translate and contextualize iconic foreign language documents related to the anti-fascist struggle in Spain. If you have a favorite document in a language other than English, let us know!
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A dossier on the lies and deceptions surrounding the Spanish Civil War could fill a library, and it’s become commonplace to underscore the mendacity of the journalists reporting on events in Spain. Still, a careful analysis of the way that major international news agencies covered the war tells a more complicated story.
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The Barcelona-born muralist Roc Blackblock, who started painting walls 25 years ago, takes his inspiration from photography to put the spotlight on historical struggles against fascism, for democracy, and for human rights as a way of intervening in the political present. “Having a good photograph to work from makes a huge difference.”
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As a lifelong organizer and a student of history, I knew enough about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to know that JFREJ at least aspires to organize within the tradition that they so distinctly represent. But I've taken the last month to do a deeper dive into that history. And I have been profoundly inspired...
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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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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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