The legal route for the investigation and persecution of crimes committed by the Nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War seemed to have reached a dead end with the suspension of Judge Baltasar Garzón last year. Yet this week an organization of Italian residents in Barcelona will being a suit for crimes against...
Read more »
The presentation last week of a new, monumental biographical dictionary in Spain has raised important questions about the relationship between the State and the projects it sponsors, as well as the persistent strength of Francoist nostalgia among the Spanish Right. The massive, 50-volume project--initiated in 1998 by the conservative government of José María...
Read more »
A judge on Spain's national criminal court has issued arrest warrants for military officials from El Salvador who played a leading role in that country's civil war. They are accused of "meticulously planning and carrying out the killings of six Jesuit priests in 1989," Elisabeth Malkin reports for the New York Times:
In a slide show to mark Memorial Day, The Nation has published a 1937 letter from a brigadista. See the slide show here (slide 4).
Read more »
Leonora Carrington, the last living Surrealist, long-time friend of Spanish Republicans, and later wife of Robert Capa's friend Cziki Weiss, died in Mexico City this week. The Times has a long obituary:
Leonora Carrington, a British-born Surrealist and onetime romantic partner of Max Ernst whose paintings depicted women and half-human beasts floating...
Read more »
I’ve been away for some days, and haven’t had time to catch up with the press coverage of the 15-May movement in Spain. But one of the messages I found in my cluttered inbox upon my return contained this link to photos of the violent disbandment of the peaceful protesters that took place today...
Read more »
The regional and municipal elections on Sunday in Spain confirmed the Left's worst fears, as the ruling Socialist Party was routed and the conservative Partido Popular achieved its largest electoral victory in its history, predicting a similar victory in next year's general election--although not all the votes that the Socialists lost went to the...
Read more »
The exhumation of the body of Chilean President Salvador Allende, at the request of his family, is expected to shed light on the still murky circumstances surrounding his death during the September 1973 coup that inaugurated the bloody regime of General Augusto Pinochet. The New York Times reports:
after nearly 38 years...
Read more »
In the slide show we prepared for the Pete Seeger benefit concert last October, we incorporated a photograph of Lincoln vets marching in the 1946 New York May Day Parade. As it turns out, there is also moving footage of this parade. See the clip here; the Lincolns make there appearance around the...
Read more »
The students in my undergraduate seminar –“Spain in New York”– and I are in the process of uploading to a word-press blog the results of our research about the history and current presence of Spain and Spanish culture in New York. The recent rally of Spanish ex-pats at the foot of the Washington Square...
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.
What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
Read more »
Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
Read more »
As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
Read more »
Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
Read more »
The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
Read more »
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 »
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