Picasso's best known work, the Guernica, will not be moved to the Basque Country, as the Basque National Party had requested, EITB reports:
The Spanish Senate's Committee on Culture on Wednesday rejected a proposal by the PNV to amend the law regulating the Reina Sofia National Museum of Art, in...
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The BBC World Service recently broadcast the 10-minute program Child evacuees from the Spanish Civil War, in which Herminio Martínez talks about his experiences as Basque child refugee. Listen to the program here.
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Ben Hughes' They Shall Not Pass: The British Battalion at Jarama (buy) is reviewed positively by Steve Andrew in the Morning Star:
Opinions differ on whether Jarama really was the victory that republicans claimed at the time, but the one thing that does emerge with some certainty from this...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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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