On May 7, the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Right Activism—a cash tribute of $100,000—honored two courageous journalists, Lydia Cacho and Jeremy Scahill, for their dedication to exposing corruption, violence, and the abuse of power which are routinely ignored by mainstream media. They do this work under life-threatening conditions of danger and risk. The day’s...
Read more »
Maria Thomas, The Faith and the Fury: Popular Anticlerical Violence and Iconoclasm in Spain, 1931-1936. Brighton, Portland, and Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, in collaboration with the Cañada Blanche Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies, 2013. xxi + 269 pp.
Live Souls: Citizens and Volunteers of Civil War Spain, by Serge Alternês & Alec Wainman. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2015. 335 pp.
Read more »
In the spring of 1937 some twenty students from Brooklyn College volunteered to fight in Spain. This unique exhibit, curated by Prof. Alejandro Alonso, in partnership with ALBA, will cover three aspects: political life on campus in the 30s; the impact of the Spanish Civil War and the debates and confrontations that took place there; and the presence of Spanish Exiles...
Read more »
I am the youngest veteran of the Spanish Civil War, born in Barcelona on July 18th, 1930. "Veteran"? Yes. Not a combatant, but a child that together with his mother and brothers survived the fascist Italian and Nazi bombings of Barcelona. My Greek father, who was a naturalized U.S. citizen, and working at Lykes...
Read more »
Mark Derby, Petals and Bullets: Dorothy Morris: New Zealand Nurse in the Spanish Civil War (Brighton/Toronto/Chicago: Sussex Academic Press, 2015).
The New Year has barely started and ALBA is already at work on an exciting number of programs and activities.
Read more »
Robert Hale Merriman, Chief of Staff of the XV International Brigade, disappeared behind enemy lines. His body was never recovered. What happened? Two memoirs and an interview give conflicting versions.
Read more »
Why did the American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War name themselves after Abraham Lincoln? Who first came up with the idea of the “Lincoln Battalion” and when? New information is complicating the long-accepted account.
Read more »
In this excerpt from his new book Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, Adam Hochschild tells the story of Swarthmore student Joe Selligman (1916-1937), the first American volunteer to join the battle for Madrid. After he left, his parents in Kentucky received an envelope mailed by a friend: “By...
Read more »
Richard Bermack is a documentary photographer and writer who has worked primarily for labor unions, including SEIU, the UAW, and the ILWU. In addition to his work on radical and labor history, he has written about and photographed workers involved in children and family services, welfare reform, aiding people with disabilities, and health care...
Read more »
This January 19th, exhumation procedures began to recover the remains of Timoteo Mendieta, murdered by the Franco regime in 1939. In 2013, his daughter Ascensión testified before María Servini, the Argentine judge who has investigated Franco’s crimes against humanity since 2010. On Servini’s orders, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory took charge of the exhumation, helped...
Read more »
The 2016 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism will be shared by journalists Lydia Cacho and Jeremy Scahill, who have dedicated their careers to exposing corruption, violence and abuse of power. Award ceremony: NYC, Saturday, May 7 (tickets)
Read more »
What you leave to friends and loved one--and the causes you champion--are ways of expressing your hopes and dreams for the future and perpetuate your part in the story of the Lincoln Brigade. As you make your plans, please consider including ALBA in your will or living trust, or naming us as a...
Read more »
Ensure more of your money goes to our mission by lowering costs and supporting our cause without a big one-time hit to your wallet.
Read more »
Of particular interest are the photos that Fernández and Argeo have rescued from family albums for Chapter V, which documents the intense pro-Republican mobilization of Spanish American communities all over the country.
Read more »
Twenty medical doctors serving in the International Brigades went straight from Spain to China to help the country defend itself against Japanese aggression. They are remembered fondly in China today.
Read more »
Las Brigadas internacionales a través del cómic: 1977-2012, Ángel Luis Arjona Márquez, Albacete, 2014.
Read more »
Christopher Vials, Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States. University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. 296 pages.
Hearty congratulations on the terrific job you have done setting up the huge database on the Volunteers! This is the crucial information and you have made it very accessible, attractive and useful. I finally found an old friend of the family here at last. A splendid job!
Read more »
In the September 2015 issue of The Volunteer an obituary of Bobby Hall pointed out that in the 1960s Hall and Jeremiah Stamler "initiated a landmark and successful court case" against HUAC. You failed to mention the third member who walked out and sued HUAC: the vet Milton M. Cohen. Here is a...
Read more »
It is always tempting to imagine writers looking over our shoulders when we critique their works, smiling or grimacing as the case may be. The compelling interview that Sebastiaan Faber conducted with Francisco Fernández and their incisive analysis of the “exhumation efforts” in Spain (“An Underground Landscape of Terror,” June 2015) made me...
Read more »
Mexico was one of the very few countries to stand by the Second Spanish Republic as it was attacked by fascism—but in practice, not all Mexicans agreed with their government’s position during the Spanish Civil War.
Read more »
The trial of the POUM in October 1938 is often seen as a Spanish version of the Soviet “show trial.” But it makes more sense to examine it as an attempt by the Republican government to build stable judicial institutions.
Read more »
The George Watt Prize for the best student essays received submissions from across the globe, the various entrants writing on topics of history, literature, politics, and culture of the Spanish Civil War, or the global political and cultural struggles against fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, or the contributions of the Americans who fought...
Read more »
In the fall of 2014, Stanley Payne and Jesús Palacios published a new biography of Francisco Franco. Spanish historian Ángel Viñas, who was finishing up his own book on the dictator, was appalled to find their account riddled with “the most flagrant and, at times, grotesque mistakes, omissions, and misleading interpretations.” This past September,...
Read more »
Some soldiers instinctively respond to concepts in international law of which they may not even be aware. When men and women in the military do or see things that offend their deeply held sense of right and wrong, they may experience moral injury, a condition that overlaps with but is not the same as...
Read more »
Max Aub (1903-1972) was born in Paris to a German-Jewish family that moved to Spain when he was 11. During the Spanish Civil War, he worked for the Republican government. After Franco’s victory he was arrested in France and spent three years in concentration camps, after which he fled to Mexico. He spent his...
Read more »
We have just returned from the Bay Area, where we joined close to 200 Lincoln family members, friends and supporters at our Annual Celebration honoring the Lincoln Brigade in Berkeley. We gathered for an afternoon of songs and to hear California writer and documentary photographer David Bacon, who described how his encounters with...
Read more »
All my life I've known about Spain. I grew up singing Freiheit and Viva la Quince Brigada and Los Cuatro Generales, and knew the names of some of the places in Spain where the big battles were fought. I owe a lot to my parents, and to the culture they helped create. They didn't...
Read more »
British and Spanish archaeologists have spent two years investigating Spanish battle sites. American journalist Steve Dinnen joined the dig at Belchite. “We are not here to tell nice stories about the past. The past hurts.”
Read more »
“We have to reclaim our history, not discard or forget it,” labor organizer David Bacon advised an enthusiastic crowd honoring the legacy of the Lincoln Brigade at the 79th Bay Area reunion event in Berkeley, California on November 8. His talk, together with tributes to Emilio Silva, this year’s winner of the ALBA/Puffin...
Read more »
When should one government intervene in the affairs of another country? When, if ever, should private civilians violate laws to participate in foreign wars? And how do we teach high school students to think about these questions? ALBA’s Peter Carroll considered these questions at the annual conference of the Ohio Council of Social Studies.
Read more »
ALBA’s fifth annual Human Rights Film Festival featured 21 documentary films from 12 countries (four world premieres, 12 New York premieres). The Randall Award went to Among the Believers, about radical Islam and a charismatic cleric in Pakistan.
Read more »
In May, 21 organizers from the US participated in a social movement delegation to Spain. The trip was timed to coincide with Spain’s municipal elections on May 24th. The group learned from new political parties that seek to make electoral politics more accountable and democracy more participatory, from social movements working on housing and...
Read more »
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
On Friday April 26, 2024, as part of my work with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Tribute Project I set out to visit the grave of Harry Farris in North Henrico, VA. I located the cemetery easily but my search for his grave proved a bit more complicated. I had the section he is buried...
Read more »
The Spanija series translates select autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google Translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and...
Read more »
With deep sadness, I write of the passing of Helene Susman, widow of Bill, at the age 103. She did not go to Spain with the Lincolns nor held a position with the VALB or ALBA, but to me and many others she was a founder of our small organization and a kindred spirit....
Read more »
The Spanija series translates select autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google Translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and places are...
Read more »
The Spanija series translates select autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google Translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatioan or Serbian and the translation of names and places are...
Read more »
The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
Read more »
The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
Read more »
The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
Read more »
The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
Read more »
The “Spanija” series translates selected autobiographical accounts by Yugoslavian and Montenegrin volunteers of their actions in the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Ray Hoff used Google translate from Croatian to English and he edited the selections. As this is a machine translation, the idiomatic features of Croatian or Serbian and the translation of names and...
Read more »
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
Search the Database