Trisha Ziff's Mexican Suitcase (trailer, Kickstarter), which after successful runs at DocuWeeks in New York and Los Angeles is on its way to the San Sebastián Film Festival, is continuing to attract the media's attention. "Memory is at the center of The Mexican Suitcase (La Maleta Mexicana), Trisha Ziff’s magnificent, complex...
Read more »
Chris Books, the ALBA Board member who is responsible for much of our online database of Lincoln Brigade volunteers, never stops researching for his Biographical Dictionary Project. Follow his latest questions and finds on his blog, Americans in the Spanish Civil War.
Read more »
Millie Rosenstein, wife of Lincoln vet Herman Rosenstein, passed away earlier this month at the age of 96 in her hometown of Santa Monica, California. The LookOut News writes:
The mother of former Santa Monica mayor Paul Rosenstein, Millie was a force...
Read more »
Film International magazine dedicates a good part of its current issue (vol. 9, no. 4) to three giants of Spanish Civil War filmmaking: Jaime Camino (La vieja memoria, Los niños de Rusia), Basilio Martín Patino (Queridísimos verdugos, Caudillo) and Vicente Aranda (Libertarias). Preview here.
Read more »
Hugh Thomas, whose The Spanish Civil War (1961) marked a milestone, was interviewed on NPR last week about his latest take on Spanish history: The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America:
THOMAS: I'm still thought of in Spain, to some extent, as Hugh Thomas of the Spanish...
Read more »
Trisha Ziff's new documentary Mexican Suitcase (trailer, Kickstarter), on the photography and historical memory of the Spanish Civil War, was among the casualties of hurricane Irene; but before the New York DocuWeeks screenings were suspended yesterday, it was officially selected for San Sebastián's Made in Spain category, for the DocMiami...
Read more »
The Latin American Herald Tribune alerts us to the publication of a new study of Cuban volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. In "La leyenda roja. Los cubanos en la guerra civil española," Denise Urcelay-Maragnès tells the story of the more than 1,000 Cubans--including a sizable number of Cuban exiles from the United...
Read more »
This event has been canceled due to expected weather conditions in New York. Tomorrow at 7:35pm at the IFC Center as part of the DocuWeeks: Special screening of "Mexican Suitcase" (86', Mexico, Spain) followed by Q&A with director Trisha Ziff. Tickets for individual films at the IFC Center are $13; $8 for ALBA's Friends - presenting...
Read more »
AMIGO, the 17th feature film from Academy Award-nominated writer-director John Sayles, stars legendary Filipino actor Joel Torre as Rafael, a village mayor caught in the murderous crossfire of the Philippine-American War.
Read more »
WPA 2.0 The Brand New Deal Cultural Arts Series Presents "Pasiones: Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939," featuring Jamie O'Reilly & Michael Smith, with Katrina O'Reilly-Greene & Bob Weber. Sunday October 9, 2:00 pm, SPACE 1245 Chicago Ave, Evanston, Il. Tickets: evanstonspace.com. Produced by J. O’Reilly Productions and portoluz.orgInfo 773 989-7825. More information
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.
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 »
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:...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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...
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