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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Matthew Rothschild, editor of the Progressive magazine, honored Lincoln vet Clarence Kailin in a Memorial Day editorial.
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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).
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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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