United We Dream, the national network of youth-led immigrant activist organizations that fight for the rights of millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States, has been selected as winner of the 2013 ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. The United We Dream Network (UWD) will receive the award at ALBA’s annual event...
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A survey of Lincoln veterans in the 1980s showed that 80 percent of the surviving volunteers were immigrants or children of immigrants. Some had participated in the mass migrations before WWI but many were relative newcomers who were "internationalists" rather than nationals.
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Harry Belafonte, Pete Seeger, and Oliver Stone join ALBA in inviting you to a celebration of the third ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, featuring United We Dream and music by Barbez and Bernardo Palombo. (Tickets | Invitation | Press Release...
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After more than seven decades of impunity, those who committed crimes during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship may finally have to face a judge. Spain has never lifted its 1977...
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The struggle to end impunity for state violence has been a central concern of the human rights movement in Latin America for decades. Efforts by victims, rights advocates, and...
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Several years ago, a researcher from the small Galician town of As Pontes, participating in the excavation of a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War in the heavily...
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While his friends Robert Capa and Gerda Taro were most at ease in action shots, Chim’s range was much wider. And although Chim--aka Dawid Szymin, aka David Seymour--was a master at the photo story, many of his single images are striking on their own.
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In 2013, the Wayne State University Abraham Lincoln Brigade Veterans Scholarship Committee will celebrate its 30th anniversary awarding scholarships to deserving students. It has been a long road that began during the Spanish Civil War when nearly 100 Michiganders joined the International Brigades. Four...
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Antonio Frasconi, the great graphic artist, illustrator, teacher and humanitarian, created this woodcut of the Lincoln Memorial, which resides in the nation’s capitol next to the famous words of the Gettysburg address, “That government, of the people, by the people, and for the people...
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Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of three articles about the work of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), a grassroots Spanish...
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Emilio Silva Faba was born in the town of Pereje (León) in 1892. In 1915 he emigrated to Argentina, where he lived in Ezpeleta, in the province of Buenos...
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Historian and ALBA emeritus chair Peter N. Carroll will be delivering the 2013 Bill Susman Lecture, “From Guernica to Human Rights,” next March 28 in New York City, at...
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The economic crisis in Spain, which many thought short-lived, appears to have no end in sight. In a desperate attempt to understand what has happened and what the near...
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This is the story of my service in the Spanish Civil War during the years 1937 and 1938 as a soldier in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the 15th...
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Ralph S. Abascal (1934-1997), attorney and defender of farmworkers’ rights, argued the case that resulted in the ban on the use of DDT and other deadly pesticides in California’s...
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Garbo: The Spy. A documentary by Edmon Roch (Spain, 2009; US release 2012, distributed by First Run Features, 88 minutes).
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Not in My Father's Footsteps. By Terrence Rundle West. (General Store Publishing House, 2011).
The Road, and Nothing More. By J.T....
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Nearly 200 people attended “George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia, 75 Years On,” a conference held this past March 2 by the International Brigade Memorial Trust in Manchester, UK. Among...
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Can anyone shed any light on the origins of this sketch? It belonged to Arthur West, an activist in the Aid Spain movement in Nottingham and a prominent local...
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Jim Benét, lifelong journalist and veteran of the American Regiment de Tren (Transport) in the International Brigades, died in December near his home in northern California of a blood...
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Tom Buchanan. East Wind: China and the British Left, 1925-1976 (Oxford University Press, 2012); “Shanghai-Madrid Axis’? Comparing British Responses to the Conflicts in Spain and China, 1936-39”, Contemporary European History...
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Moises Broggi i Vallès, Catalan surgeon who served in the 35th International Division Medical Services, passed away on December 31, 2012. As a young doctor, working in an on...
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On the last day of 2012, Dr. Moisès Broggi decided to not celebrate New Year’s Eve for 105th time in his life. Some months earlier we had finished up...
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Dear ALBA, On behalf of the Broggi family (Dr. Moisés Broggi was my wife’s grandfather), I want to thank you for the thoughtful obituary published in The Volunteer. …...
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Sylvia H. Thompson, who spent her life fighting for the poor and oppressed and championing the legacy of the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, died of cancer in...
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Dr. Josep Maria Massons Esplugas, former head of the surgical team for the International Brigades, passed away in Barcelona on November 10, 2012. Born in Valls (Tarragona, Catalonia) on...
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David Lomon, who died on 21 December 2012, aged 94, was the last known survivor in Britain of the more than 2,500 volunteers from the British Isles who joined...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to promoting public awareness, research, and discussion about the Spanish Civil War. Learn more at our website or
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Los brigadistas chinos en la Guerra Civil: La llamada de España (1936-1939), by Hwei-Ru Tsou and Len Tsou, was published this month by Los Libros de la Catarata in Madrid, Spain. This new book is a Spanish edition of the original Chinese book, The Call of Spain: The Chinese Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) which was...
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Paco de Onís at Skylight Pictures writes:
This indelible image captures the moment at the Guatemalan trial of former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, when he and his mustachioed legal team are listening to Judge Jasmín Barrios as she pronounces him guilty of commiting genocide and crimes against humanity against the Maya Ixil people,...
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More on the Ríos Montt conviction in today’s broadcast of Democracy Now! http://m.democracynow.org/stories/13637
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The BBC reports from Guatemala City, where ALBA/Puffin Award winners Fredy Peccerelli and Kate Doyle have been testifying in the historical trial of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt:
Friends and Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade hosted a presentation on the Asian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War earlier this month in Tamiment Library at New York University. To a packed house house, Len Tsou described how he became interested in the topic after viewing the film The Good Fight, which features a...
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On the 82 anniversary of the founding of the Spanish Republic, Appellate Court Judge, E.J. Salcines, tells a wonderful story about the Republican flag at Tampa’s Centro Asturiano. 14 April 2013, Salcines Park, West Tampa https://vimeo.com/64033205
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The images from the Len Crome lecture and conference on George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia are now available on the IBMT’s Flickr site.
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An excellent post at the NYRblog by human-rights leader Aryeh Neier about the unprecedented prosecution of Guatemala’s former head of state: …the prosecution of General Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala, now eighty-six years old, stands out in at least one respect. For the first time, a former head of state is being tried for...
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On Sunday, participants in Argentina’s National Day of Memory march stretched the whole length of the Avenida de Mayo—from the Congressional Plaza to the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the presidential palace. That’s a distance of almost two kilometers. They came together to commemorate March 24, 1976, when the military overthrew a democratically-elected...
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Executive Producers Jeanne Houck (ALBA Board Member) & Michele Fillion (EP and director) announce the TV broadcast premiere of “No Job for A Woman”: The Women Who Fought to Report WWII on PBS World Channel starting March 20th. Before World War II, war reporting was considered NO JOB FOR A WOMAN. But when American...
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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