"The Last Hero of the Battle of the Ebro," reads the headline in El País reporting the discovery of the remains of a Republican soldier last week, during an excavation of trenches that made up the last line of defense in the last moments of the famous Spanish Civil War battle. Given...
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David Granville reviews Michael Quinn's new biography of Michael O'Riordan, former IRA member, International Brigader and Irish Communist Party leader for over four decades, for the Morning Star:
Quinn's book, covering the years 1938-1947, spans O'Riordan's return from Spain - where he had continued the fight against fascism begun in...
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José Sanchís Sinisterra 1987 blockbuster Spanish Civil War play ¡Ay Carmela!, very successfully adapted to the screen by Carlos Saura in 1990, has just opened in a new production at the GALA Hispanic Theater under the direction of José Luis Arellano García. The show is "stirring" and "eloquent", Celia Wren wrote...
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James Salter reviews Hemingway's Boat, Paul Hendrickson's new biography of the writer of For Whom the Bell Tolls, in the latest NYRB:
Hemingway’s Boat, which covers the last twenty-seven years of Hemingway’s life, from 1934 to 1961, is not, as is made clear at the beginning, a conventional biography....
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ALBA condemns the execution on September 21 of Troy Davis. In remembrance of Troy Davis and Mark MacPhail.
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Amy Goodman's Democracy Now features an interview with anthropologist David Graeber, son of Lincoln vet Kenneth Graeber, about the "Occupy Wall Street" campaign. "Occupy Wall Street," finds it inspiration, among other things, in the recent mobilization of Spanish indignados:
As President Obama prepares to outline a deficit-reduction plan that includes tax increases,...
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In today's Times, Kathryn Sikkink, a Minnesota political scientist, makes the case for the kinds of human rights persecutions that Baltasar Garzón helped institute:
My research shows that transitional countries — those moving from authoritarian governments to democracy or from civil war to peace — where human rights prosecutions have taken place...
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Mike Hall writes for the AFL/CIO blog about a new online exhibit on the activism of Paul Robeson, who famously traveled to Spain in support of the Spanish Republic and the volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade:
Paul Robeson, once the premier African American artist of the 20th century, is well known...
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Manus O'Riordan, Ireland Secretary of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, alerts us to the resuscitation of charges in relation to Irish IBer Fran Ryan that have already been refuted. On 11 September 2011, the Irish edition of News International’s Sunday Times carried the following report by Lorraine Wemyss:
The campus of Queen's University Belfast was festooned with Nazi...
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Jim Jump sends us the latest newsletter from the International Brigade Memorial Trust, ALBA's British sister organization. Among the many items of interest: news on the sundry 75th anniversary celebrations in the UK and Spain; a report on the celebration at Jubilee Garden; an obituary for Nathan Clark; a portrait of John Harnor,...
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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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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...
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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...
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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.
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“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...
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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.
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We talk about the “return” of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain, even though that massive painting had never been here before its “repatriation” in 1981. The magnificent show “Ben Shahn: On Non-Conformity” curated by Laura Katzman and on display until February 26 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, elicits a similar sense:...
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Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
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Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
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When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
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Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
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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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