On October 22, 1936, exactly 75 years ago, President Largo Caballero signed the decree which brought into existence the International Brigades. Today, several hundred people, including four IB veterans, three representatives of ALBA, and a considerable contingent of Friends and Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, attended the inauguration of a monument to the...
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Jim Jump, our IBMT friend from across the pond, sends along stirring video footage and a slide show from the October 1 gala in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the IB's founding. Here's a film by Sanum Ghafoor based on the IBMT gala evening in London on 1 October, including excerpts from the performances and interviews...
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Philosophy Football, the British company that recently sponsored the 75th anniversary gala honoring the British International Brigaders, have come out with a new T-shirt for "Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade." For more tees inspired by the IBs and Spanish Civil War, see here . See here, and click "dissenters."
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The events commemorating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigades have begun. Tomorrow will see the unveiling of a new, 12-foot monument to the IB on the campus of the Universidad Complutense, featuring the three-pointed star and the famous lines with with Dolores Ibárruri bade farewell the the IBers in October...
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Yolanda (Bobby) Hall, life-long activist and widow of Lincoln veteran Chuck Hall, is being honored by the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group at its annual gala on November 12, featuring the author Barbara Ehrenreich. See here for a 1999 interview with Bobby as part of the Working Women's History Project....
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A hundred-year-old man is helped up on to a plastic milk crate, and prepares to address the crowd at Occupy Wall Street. “Mic check” shouts the facilitator, and her words are repeated by the crowd in a kind of reverse echo, moving in concentric circles from the milk crate out in all directions. The...
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Our friends at the IBMT alert us to a new 27-minute film by Javier Pascal and Cristina Ciobanu about the International Brigades, featuring extensive interviews with British volunteers David Lomon and Thomas Watters and songs from the "Goodbye Barcelona" musical. See the film here.
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(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008) Review published in American Studies, Vol 50, Nos 3/4, Fall/Winter, 2009. This is an impressive piece of scholarship, which combines admirable bibliographic and archival research with clear, engaging prose. Throughout the book’s five main chapters, Schreiber painstakingly reconstructs the biographical and artistic trajectories of a talented and diverse...
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Robert Llopis is sending along the information on this year's Tribute to the International Brigades in Benissa (in Catalan, Spanish, and English):
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Cable Street in London’s East End, an area which is now predominantly Bengali as it had been predominantly Jewish in 1936, saw 1,000 people march this October 2 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the defeat of the attempt of the British Union of Fascists to stage their hate match through the area. See...
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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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