When he volunteered in 1937 to fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War, 20-year old Samuel Levinger was an undergraduate at Ohio State University in Columbus, a Socialist, and the son of a rabbi. This recently recovered letter is self-explanatory as to its purpose and intention and, fair warning, will touch most readers...
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Joined by guests from Spain, France, Austria, Denmark, and the Netherlands, the German Fighters and Friends of the Spanish Republic 1936-1939 held their 13th annual get-together in Berlin last September. Major themes at the meeting concerned plans for next October’s 75th commemoration of the founding of the International Brigades and how to coordinate activities...
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Looking Back at the Spanish Civil War is a collection of the first 10 Len Crome annual lectures sponsored by the IBMT. Antifascistas is more of a picture book designed to accompany a traveling exhibition honoring the role of British and Irish volunteers in Spain. 
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On September 17, over 150 people attended the opening of “La colonia: a photo album of Spanish immigrants in New York, 1898–1945” at NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center. Curated by ALBA board member James D. Fernández, “La colonia” uses the family archives of seven descendants of Spanish immigrants to explore and display the history of Spaniards in New York.  (Video...
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What follows is not the laying of charges. It is a recording secretary’s deposition. I catalogue the ruins, count the dead, weigh up the spilled blood. I have seen all these images of the martyred city of Madrid that I will try to show you, although mostly they defy description. I do not care for propaganda tracts or...
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Although Picasso experts agree that the painter’s interest in the war as a subject was sparked some time in late 1936 or early 1937, the precise circumstances of the “conversion” that made the Guernica possible were never fully made clear—until now, that is. Last year, while preparing an edition of the Spanish Civil War...
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Buenaventura Durruti was a hero to the anarchist movement, and his death on the Madrid front on November 20, 1936, saw a mass outpouring of grief from Spain’s anarchists. The paper details the development of the posthumous cult of personality of Durruti between his death and the Barcelona May Days of 1937 and their...
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Between World Wars I and II, the contentious issue of nationalism—how it can be shaped in radical or conservative ways by racially oppressed people; whether it must be embraced or superseded by Black social movements worldwide—was a complex terrain on which members of the African Diasporagalvanized their extended communities. Contradictions abounded in the ideological...
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ALBA’s George Watt Memorial Essay Prizes are awarded annually to a graduate student and an undergraduate student who have written an outstanding essay or thesis chapter about any aspect of the Spanish Civil War, the global political or cultural struggles against fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, or the lifetime histories and contributions of the Americans who fought in support of the Spanish Republic from...
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Viewing Taro’s negatives of the Battle of Brunete, preserved for seventy years in the Mexican Suitcase, is like seeing a ghost. They constitute a visual record of the last days of her life. Indeed, many of them have a ghostly quality. Whether the negatives have deteriorated over the years or were originally overexposed, many of them have a phantom look to them:...
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On Tuesday, November 2, over 40 New York City public high school teachers of social studies attended the second annual ALBA/Puffin Professional Development Day at NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center. The teachers were selected from a pool of almost 100 applicants. In the morning session, James D. Fernández and Peter N. Carroll introduced the teachers...
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There’s an extra beat here, I think.” Pete Seeger’s banjo tentatively picks the chords to “Viva la Quince Brigada,” the classic Spanish Civil War song that he first recorded in 1943. While Seeger, who is turning 92 this year, half-hums the staccato Spanish lyrics, blues singer Guy Davis hesitantly follows along on his guitar. (Event video here.) The tiny green...
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Ken Loach is making his films available for free online. See his Spanish Civil War film Land and Freedom (1995) here.
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Some videos of interviews made by El País at the opening La Colonia: Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898-1945, the stunning photography exhibit curated by ALBA Board member James D. Fernández and co-sponsored by ALBA, on display till the end of 2010 at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center in New York....
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Gabriel Jackson spoke with Sebastiaan Faber in April 2010. See here for the written interview.
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Lincoln vet Peter Schemrock died on June 24 in southern California, a few weeks before his 100th birthday. Peter was born on August 17, l910, in Dunbar, Pennsylvania. His family went back to Croatia (former Yugoslavia) when he was about four years old. Peter returned to the United States as a young man during...
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My father, Norman (Nathan) Berkowitz, died peacefully at the age of 96 on July 30, 2010. After not being able to speak for 36 hours, Norman rallied and spoke continuously for 30 minutes. His final words were directed to his grandson and they were, surprisingly, entirely in Spanish. Not surpisingly, they were about his...
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As Judge Baltasar Garzón faces a backlash that may cost him his position in Spain’s judiciary, ALBA invited María Blanco to give the keynote talk at the annual reunion of the Bay Area veterans and friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Berkeley, California, on May 30, 2010. What follows is the full text...
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After regular classes ended for 20 Ohio high school teachers last June, they spent another six days on the Oberlin College campus attending the first ALBA Institute in the Midwest. Consisting of nine social studies, nine Spanish, and two English teachers, covering all high school grade levels, the group worked on lesson plans and...
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For the last two years, ALBA’s Teachers Institute in Tampa, Florida, has focused on the needs of social studies professionals (generally history teachers), helping them to imagine and develop classroom approaches to the study of the Spanish Civil War and its global significance. This summer’s week-long institute encouraged teachers to write their own assignments...
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“My great aunt told me that she was married as a young girl but because she and her husband were both employed by the Writer’s Project they had to keep their union a secret. When her husband went to Spain he had to leave without telling her. She gave me her wedding band which...
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War is not all shot and shell and go to hell. Infrequently, it’s play. It was on this occasion, when the Lincoln and Washington Brigades got together after Brunete for R and R—and a baseball game. I was the unofficial athletic director of the ALB, the proud guardian of all the bats and balls...
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For three years, the French and German International Brigade Associations, respectively A.C.E.R. and K.S.F.R., have pushed for the creation of an international umbrella committee whose role would be to link the many national IB associations. The most recent meeting for the future “Coordination Internationale” took place in Paris last May. Delegations, principally from Europe,...
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The 74th annual Bay Area reunion of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, held in Berkeley, California, on May 30, paid tribute to the legal work of Judge Baltasar Garzón in challenging decades of silence about mass murders conducted during the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. The program, part of...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and the Puffin Foundation are thrilled to announce a major new initiative: the Puffin/ALBA Human Rights Project (HRP), established to honor all those who fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War by connecting that legacy with international activist causes today, in particular the defense of human rights.
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After twenty-six years in Barcelona, one of the world’s most prominent historians of twentieth-century Spain has moved back to the United States. Few foreign scholars command the respect and authority that Gabriel Jackson enjoys in Spain. For the past decade, Jackson has been working on a major biography of Juan Negrín, the Republic’s Prime...
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The morning of the publishing of the Saville Enquiry Report, June 15th 2010, I received an early call, from Elaine Brotherton, a close friend and niece of William McKinney, who was one of the thirteen men who shot dead by the British Army on January 30th 1972. The event became known to the world...
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Tomorrow evening I’ll join with / many others for a meeting of the / Revolutionary Poets Brigade. / The Brigade exists because you / fought in Spain, Nate Thornton.
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Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham. Introduction by Nick Tosches. New York Review of Books/paperback. On his way out of Spain in 1938, Bill Gresham, a Baltimore-born volunteer in the John Brown Artillery company of the International Brigades, heard a strange story from one of his comrades, Joseph “Doc” Halliday, about an alcoholic carnival...
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El tema de la Guerra Civil Española en Argentina siempre ha sido una cuestión llamativa, y sigue permaneciendo en la memoria colectiva como uno de los acontecimientos populares y solidarios más importantes de nuestro país. Pero para la mayoría de los casos sólo se recuerda la solidaridad desde lo humanitario, y la ayuda material....
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To the Editor: Friends of ALBA will be pleased to know that there is a new monument to a member of the International Brigades in Spain. The monument, to the Irish brigadista Charlie Donnelly, was dedicated in February 2010, on the 72nd anniversary of his death in the Battle of Jarama. Charlie Donnelly was...
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Antonio Celada, Manuel González and Daniel Pastor respond to the Volunteer's review of their book Los Internacionales. Eduardo Corrales sends a greeting.
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John Murra (1916-2006) claimed he made up his mind to go to Spain in 20 minutes. “A recruiter asked me to go, I’d never been to Spain. It was a place I was interested in.” In February 1937, Murra put his plans to do graduate work in sociology on hold and set...
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Isabelle Rohr, The Spanish Right and the Jews, 1898-1945: Anti-Semitism and Opportunism, Brighton/Portland Sussex University Press, 2008. This is an intriguing study of the relationship mostly of the Spanish Right, but also until the post-Franco years, of the Spanish state itself, with its own Jews, so to speak, the Sephardic community. It hearkens back...
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The University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights has chosen two students to receive human rights awards in honor of Lincoln vet Abe Osheroff and his wife Gunnel Clark. This year’s winners are graduate students Erin Murphy and Peter Morris, each of whom will receive $750 toward their international human rights...
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