Preparations for ALBA's annual celebration in New York City this Saturday May 14 are entering the final stretch. Some tickets are still available for the lunch with ALBA-Puffin Human Rights awardee Baltasar Garzón and Prof. Jonathan Turley (12-2pm) and for the award ceremony--with music, speeches, and commemorations of the Lincoln vets we lost...
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Simon Leys reviews new editions of George Orwell's diaries and letters in the latest issue of the New York Review:
Blair’s personal life and Orwell’s public activity both reflected one powerfully single-minded personality. Blair-Orwell was made of one piece: a recurrent theme in the testimonies of all those who knew him at...
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The Guardian's Giles Tremlett explains the significance of the new national map identifying thousands of mass grave sites in Spain, which was published last week:
Presenting the results of almost four years of work, the interior minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, said: "No human being should be buried in a ditch." Not...
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The new film by Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields, The Mission) tells the story of Josémaría Escrivá, the founder of the militant secular order Opus Dei, whose members formed the institutional backbone of the Franco regime, is attracting a lot of media attention. This past week it has been reviewed--not very enthusiastically--in the
Our friends at the International Brigades Memorial Trust in the UK send along their latest newsletter featuring, among other things: news on the IB musical, "Goodbye Barcelona"; some interesting insights on Harry Potter & the Spanish Civil War; a review of Paul Preston's The Spanish Holocaust; a profile of Janet Vaughan, who...
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Gert Hoffmann, the Austrian International Brigader, will be turning 94 soon. He sends us the following note :
Reflecting on the anniversary of the end of the Second World War, I recall the hopes we had in that moment of great relief, of peace finally regained. But I wonder--I have wondered for decades--whether...
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The BBC commemorated the 74th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica last week with a radio program. Listen to the podcast here.
The president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, has announced that judge Baltasar Garzón--currently suspended from his post in Spain and working as special advisor to the International Criminal Court--may play an observer's role in the reform of the Ecuadorian judiciary, the Americas Society reports. Garzón visited the country last week. Ecuador is getting ready...
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The University of Iowa Press has just published Hemingway's Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War by Alex Vernon:
In 1937 and 1938, Ernest Hemingway made four trips to Spain to cover its civil war for the North American News Alliance wire service and to help create the pro-Republican documentary...
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Today the Spanish government released an online, interactive national map detailing the location of Civil War events as well as thousands of mass graves that have been identified over the past dozen years, thanks in large part to the efforts of grassroots organizations such as the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria...
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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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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...
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China was entangled in multiple local and global crises when this image was published on the back cover of a Shanghai-based magazine.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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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