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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
Nicolai Ouroussoff reviews a fascinating exhibit in Montreal on architecture during World War II, which "opens with two images — one depicting the half-crumbled ruins of Guernica after the April 1937 Nazi terror bombings, the other showing two women wandering across the wasteland of Hiroshima, umbrellas in hand, on a wet day sometime...
Read more »
Anna Grau, the New York correspondent for the Spanish newspaper ABC, has written a long, moving, and thoroughly researched tribute to the Lincoln Brigade in the online magazine FronteraD, with profiles of Bill Bailey, Alvah Bessie, and John Leopold Simon, and interviews with ALBA's James Fernández and Gabriel Jackson. Read the whole article (in...
Read more »
New information from military files indicates that Chilean President Salvador Allende--whose remains were recently exhumed--may not have committed suicide on September 11, 1973, the day of Pinochet's military coup, Pascale Bonnefoy reports in today's New York Times:
The file, which was reported by a program on state television Monday night, contains...
Read more »
The Guardian's Giles Tremlett covers the controversy surrounding Spain's newly issued national biographical dictionary, in which the biography of Franco was assigned to a well-known apologist for the dictator (a term that said apologist refused to apply to his subject). An increasing number of academics and politicians are calling for a withdrawal...
Read more »
Matthew Rothschild, editor of the Progressive magazine, honored Lincoln vet Clarence Kailin in a Memorial Day editorial.
Read more »
Last week in Brussels I had a public debate with Jordi Gracia, who holds the chair of Spanish literature at the University of Barcelona, about the nature of Spanish culture during the Franco dictatorship and the place of Republican exiles in Spanish cultural history. The exchange was sparked by Gracia's book on the topic,...
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.
The war in Spain was barely over, but the scramble to define the legacy of the International Brigades was on. Were they valiant antifascists, or had they been agents, victims, or dupes of world communism? In pre-1945 US popular culture, the brigadistas were often portrayed as heroic antifascists. At the same time, there were...
Read more »
China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
Read more »
The Republic’s fight against fascism was not limited to the trenches. There was also a quieter, though no less vital front—the judiciary—where the Republic fought to preserve legality, due process, and democratic norms.
Read more »
Major US films and series about the Spanish Civil War have been few and far between. Why has Hollywood shied away from a topic that, on the face of it, presents such a trove of compelling stories?
Read more »
Close to 35 years after serving as a head nurse in the Spanish Civil War, Fredericka Martin, by then an accomplished author, returned to Spain to revisit the hospital sites where she had her fellow volunteers had saved hundreds of lives. Another half century later, Gina Benavidez, a doctoral candidate, followed Martin’s trail.
Read more »
Although this text by Ivens is little known—and has never been translated before—it offers an eye-opening reflection on the power of his filmmaking.
Read more »
Antifascism has long been synonymous with American values. In 1934, student activists at New York’s City College arguably understood this better than many do today.
Read more »
After the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, the Seegers family did not hesitate to join the resistance. They had experience fighting fascism: their son Piet had fought for the Spanish Republic. When Tom King started digging into his family history seventy years later, he fell from one surprise into the other.
Read more »
Tina Modotti’s short life took her from Italy to North Beach and from there to Mexico, Berlin, Moscow, and civil-war Spain. Rightly known as a pathbreaking modernist photographer, she was also a radical activist. “Modotti spent the second part of her working life fighting for revolution.”
Read more »
Kirsten Weld has spent years studying Latin American dictatorships and the citizens who fight to hold them accountable. That experience has proven valuable in her current role as president of the AAUP chapter at Harvard, which, in March, sued the federal government for targeting students and faculty—and won.
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