The death earlier this week of the Spanish-French novelist Jorge Semprún Maura at age 87 has spurred dozens of reflections on the importance of his life and work--both intimately tied up with the major events and movements of the twentieth century. Semprún, who wrote most of his books in French, was the son of...
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PBS's History Detectives airing on June 28, 2011, includes a moving episode on the friendship between Lincoln Brigaders Sol Fellman and Doug Roach, featuring interviews with Matti Mattson and ALBA's Jim Fernández. View the whole 18-minute segment here. Be sure to check the listings of your local PBS station for more details. 
A Moment in the Sun, the monumental new historical novel by ALBA board member John Sayles, is praised by Tom LeClair in this weekend's Times book review:
“A Moment in the Sun” is, it should be said, nearly 1,000 pages long. Sayles responds to readers’ presumed resentment against its bulk (a resentment...
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The uproar continues around Diccionario Biográfico Español, whose first 25 volumes were released last week by the Royal Academy of History, as the Spanish Parliament is demanding a thorough revision. The Financial Times covers the controversy; and I joined in on a collective op-ed that appeared yesterday in Público:
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The New Yorker's Dan Kaufman had lunch with Baltasar Garzón when he was in New York in May to receive the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism:
“My family on my father’s side was more progressive, while on my mother’s side they were more conservative,” Garzón said. His mother’s brother, Gabriel,...
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A lovely evocation, in video and prose, of Harold Meloffsky, Ernie Arion, and Bernie Abramofsky (Aibel) by Spanish journalist Pablo Mediavilla, marred only by a gratuitous and puzzling swipe at NYU students. Historical irony: the recipient of most of the letters on which these evocations were based, was Miriam Sigel, mother of the NYU...
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The amount of archival materials related to the Spanish Civil War that are being made available online keeps growing. The Archivo Rojo, managed by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, provides a stunning number of photographs (more than 3,000) gathered by the Junta Delegada de Defensa de Madrid to denounce the atrocities committed by...
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Today I’d like to share with you my honest understanding of what has been going on in Spain over the last few weeks. It’s not easy to make sense of what’s going on; the mainstream Spanish press, in my opinion, has been getting things quite wrong, or else ignoring the situation, except in its...
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A "relentlessly harrowing read": that is how Nick Lyne characterizes The Spanish Holocaust, Paul Preston's new book on the repression during and after the Spanish Civil War, which was published in Spanish earlier this year and is due out in the UK next spring:
provides, page after page, factual, documentary accounts...
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Shortly after the exhumation of Chilean President Salvador Allende, whose long-assumed suicide has now been called into question, the Communist Party of Chile has called for an investigation into the death of Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda, who also died in 1973, alleging that he may have been poisoned. The BBC reports that...
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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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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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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...
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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...
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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.
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On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
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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.
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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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