"Bradley Manning, the soldier being held on suspicion of leaking classified material to Wikileaks, is being moved to a different prison after what the Associated Press describes as "international criticism about his treatment," Richard Adams reports in the Guardian. ALBA's Bay...
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Six senior Bush administration officials accused of creating a legal framework for the torture of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay prison will not, for now, be investigated by a Spanish court, the Associated Press reported last week:
A Spanish judge has thrown out a request that he probe . Judge Eloy Velasco said...
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An extremely rare Capa print is offered for sale next week, The Guardian reports:
A rare photograph by celebrated war photographer Robert Capa is to be sold at auction as part of one of the greatest private collections of historic news images – a treasure trove from the heyday of photojournalism. The Capa photograph...
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I would like to add a note on Picasso's sketch on a copy of Paris-Soir of April 19th, 1937. Since my piece was published in The Volunteer I have come across some new information that links the evidence on Picasso's initial engagement with the Spanish Civil War at the end of 1936 and...
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In yesterday's Público, Ernesto Ekaizer laid out the same hypothesis that we proffered on the ALBA blog last week, in an op-ed appropriately titled "The Judicial Puzzle." The hypothesis is the following: One of the main reasons the Supreme Court Justice in charge of the Gürtel case is making so much haste...
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Julio Lázaro reports in El País today:
Supreme Court prosecutors have requested acquittal for Judge Baltasar Garzón in the conclusion they have sent to the Penal Section of the court, which is to judge him for ordering the jailhouse wiretaps of conversations between the ringleaders of the Gurtel racket and their lawyers. The...
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Via the New York Times, Agence France-Presse reports:
Decades after President Salvador Allende died in a 1973 coup, Chile is preparing to exhume his body to determine once and for all whether he took his own life or was murdered by...
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I finally figured out how to upload to vimeo.com the video I made in 2004 about ALBA and the uses to which the archive was being put in the early 2000s. Many of the details contained in the video are by now obsolete: the number of surviving veterans has dramatically declined since 2004; the...
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The family of Chilean President Salvador Allende, who died during the 1973 Pinochet coup, is requesting that his body be exhumed in order to help determine the cause of death, Democracy Now! reports:
Allende was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup. His official cause of death was listed as suicide, but it has...
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Spain in/and the United States Screening and discussion of two documentaries about Spaniards in the US. NYU’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese and its King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, together with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and the Comisión de Archivos de La Nacional, are pleased to present filmmaker Luis Argeo, who...
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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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