The progressive policies of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero, who this week announced that he will not be running for a third term, have been alarming conservatives and Catholics beyond Spain. When the Pope visited earlier this past fall--an event which brought thousands of Spaniards to the streets in protest--he stunned...
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On Saturday, April 23, Columbia University and the International Center of Photography will present a day-long symposium titled “China and Spain, 1936-39: Robert Capa and the Global Popular Front.” Bringing together eleven scholars from the U.S. and China, the symposium will explore the interconnections between the Spanish Civil War and the concurrent Chinese...
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Jonathan Freedland writes in the Guardian on the Valle de los Caídos, Franco's monstrous monument, which continues to attract controversy:
Spain's socialist government understands the potency of Valle de los Caídos, or Valley of the Fallen. Indeed, much energy has been devoted to taming it. Since 2009, the site has been closed to general...
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The legendary camera factory and photography agency are teaming up for a series of multimedia essays, the first one of which
examines the legacy of Magnum photographers and Leica users from the Spanish Civil War to the present including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Bruce Davidson, Elliot Erwitt, Constantine Manos, Susan Meiselas, Alex...
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The Guardian's Giles Tremlett, author of Ghosts of Spain, asks Barcelona publishers, among other things, why Spanish writers are still so obsessed with the legacy of the Spanish civil war. Listen to the podcast here.
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The BBC reports:
Former Argentine Gen Eduardo Cabanillas has been sentenced to life in prison for running a notorious detention centre during military rule in 1976-83. Three former intelligence officers were also convicted of murder, torture and illegal imprisonment. Around 200 left-wing activists were kidnapped and taken to the Automotores Orletti secret prison...
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On this day, 1939, Franco declared victory over the Spanish Republic. In this five-minute video, produced for the exhibition “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War,” several New Yorkers, including Lincoln vets Abe Osheroff and Abe Smorodin, remember that sad day. Video here: When the War Was Over
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The socialization and assimilation of second generation children of immigrants promoted by World War II is a relatively well-known phenomenon. Peter Carroll has argued that for many of the children-of-immigrant volunteers in the Lincoln Brigade, service in Spain was, in a complex way, a path towards Americanization. This insight is powerfully borne out in...
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Some years ago, a student of mine did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the percentage of Hispanic surnames that are included on the Lincoln Brigade roster, and she came up with the figure of 8% – 12%. The ALBA archives contain the personal papers of roughly 280 volunteers, or about 10% of the total number...
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Honest archival work is, I think, the most powerful antidote against complacent and arrogant certainty about the past. I believe that most of us somehow instinctively feel that the present is immensely complex and hard to grasp, and yet we often allow ourselves to think about the past as being somehow less complicated. While...
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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 iconic group portrait of raggedy Lincoln Brigade volunteers that’s become ALBA’s calling card over the years is now finally available in an uncropped, high-res print. When and where was it taken? And who exactly are these 29 men?
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Tina Modotti and Vittorio Vidali, who dedicated a major part of their lives to the Communist International, have long been surrounded by myth. New research by the historian David Jorge suggests that they consistently strove for broad leftist fronts—even when the leadership of the Comintern favored other tactics.
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Leon Bibel, a New-York-based painter, printmaker, and teacher who worked with the WPA and was only discovered by the public years after his death in 1995, was primed from birth to identify with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
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Can conservation be a revolutionary practice? In his new book, The Monument of Tomorrow, Miguel Caballero shows that it certainly can. The story it tells is also the story of the Madrid that the Abraham Lincoln Brigade encountered—and helped shape—during the war.
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Few political leaders of modern Spain have been as maligned as Prime Minister Juan Negrín, who died in exile in 1956. But his personal papers, which have been only open to researchers since 2014, challenge long-standing portrayals of Negrín advanced by anti-Communist critics on both the left and right.
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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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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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