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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Manuel Rivas's interview with Garzón, filmed by Isabel Coixet last fall and screened at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, is now available for viewing online at Filmin.es for a modest fee (90 min., Spanish, 2.95 euros). See it here.
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"I have no lack of memory, and many Socialists like me have no lack of memory, either. We know what dirty tricks this gentleman has played on us. And we are not going to forgive him." ("Yo no carezco de memoria y muchos socialistas como yo no carecemos de memoria. Y sabemos las putadas...
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Dogstar7 has uploaded a video with an interview of the family of Clarence Kailin, veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, on the 125th Anniversary of Haymarket. See the video here:
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Baltasar Garzón spoke last night at the University of Minnesota. See the whole speech here:
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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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