With the passing of William Loren Katz, the world has lost a great historian and educator. Katz helped reshape the way American history is taught, publishing over 40 books on African American, Native American, and progressive history and editing two major series totaling over 200 books on anti-slavery resistance and African American thought. His lifetime...
Read more »
The International Brigades were a hybrid bunch: multi-ethnic, multi-national—and multi-lingual: not everybody spoke everybody’s language. This posed serious organizational challenges for the Republican war effort.
Read more »
The Record of John Gates at the Front, as described by his by his Brigade Commander The Volunteer for Liberty, V1, No. 20, October 25, 1937. 86 Brigada Mixta – Mando The adjutant Political Commissar of the 86th Brigade, Comrade John Gates, was one of the organizers of the 20th International Battalion that left...
Read more »
Spanish Republican Exile / Intimate Portraits: Sender Barayón. A Trip into the Light (2019) Venue: KJCC Auditorium // 53 Washington Square South, NYC November 19, 2019 7:00 pm Sender Barayón. A Trip to the Light (2019) Documentary , Dir. Luis Olano Runtime: 1 hour 32 minutes In English US premiere From the Spanish Civil...
Read more »
Nuestra Voz, Organo de la 86 Brigada, No. 3, 18 de Julio 1937, p. 4-5 The comrades fighting in the front lines know better than anybody else the importance of having a well organized Medical Corps. Both the health of the soldier in everyday life and the condition of the same man, when wounded...
Read more »
Nuestra Voz, Organo de la 86 Brigada, No. 2, 13 de Julio 1937, p. 3 Lieutenant Ronald Dart served as a combat officer in the American Air Force for seven years. In sympathy with the workers of the world, he resigned his commission. When the call to arms was sounded by the anti-fascists, he...
Read more »
Nuestra Voz, Organo de la 86 Brigada, No. 1, 2 de Junio 1937, p. 3 The English Company of the 20th Battalion has had its baptism. Isolated from the main body of the Battalion, waiting for relief from day to day, the company maintained its morale, held its discipline. It learned and it has...
Read more »
The Volunteer, v2, no. 2, January 13, 1938 BALLAD OF TERUEL The General stood in Teruel Whence not a few had fled; He called his brave defenders up And unto them he said: “Soldiers, today we stand as one To crush the wicked Red....
Read more »
The Volunteer for Liberty, p. 10.v.2, no. 2, January 13, 1938. Cyprus, a small island in the Eastern Mediterranean, has a population of 340,000. Cyprus, now a British colony, has been under British imperialist domination since 1878. The foreign ruler subjects the people to a life of degradation and misery. ...
Read more »
Lloyd Edward Johnson was 41-years old when he arrived in Spain in April 1937. He was the oldest of four sons born to Norwegian immigrants Seavert and Nesina Johnson. Johnson was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. He applied for a position as an apprentice electrician with the Northern Pacific Railway Company when...
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.
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