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.
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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 »
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.
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
“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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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,...
Read more »
From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
Read more »
Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
Read more »
New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.
Read more »
On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
Read more »
In 1944, Barsky wrote A Surgeon Goes to War, an 18-chapter memoir of his time in Spain, which was never published but can be consulted at NYU’s Tamiment Library. This is the first chapter.
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