The international media are gearing up for the upcoming two trials of Judge Baltasar Garzón. "Is it Crash and Burn Time?" Daniel Woolls asks, writing for the Associated Press:
On Tuesday, Garzon goes on trial for allegedly ordering illegal jailhouse wiretaps in a domestic corruption probe. A week later he appears in...
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Garzón's successor at Spain's National Criminal Court, Judge Pablo Ruz, has sent the prosecutor a 19-page brief reactivating the investigation of human rights abuses and war crimes at the detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, El País reports. Given the lack of judicial action on the part of the US and British authorities, Ruz...
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A group of prominent Spanish intellectuals including the poet Luis García Montero and filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar have rallied to the support of Baltasar Garzón, the crusading Spanish magistrate who last year received the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. So have Human Rights organizations worldwide. In the next two weeks, Garzón will...
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This year’s 5th annual Jarama commemoration will take place during the weekend of Friday 17th to Sunday 19th February. As well as the 5th Jarama Memorial Walk, which will take place on Saturday 18th, there will be other events over the weekend. On Friday 17th, Hugh Purcell, whose work on Tom Wintringham, The Last...
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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 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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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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Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
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Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
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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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