At a moving and inspirational ceremony on May 2 in New York City, two ALBA/Puffin Awards for Human Rights Activism were awarded to Bay Resistance and Unión del Barrio, two California-based organizations.
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The first in a series of online roundtable gatherings about the challenges and opportunities of teaching antifascist history today took place on April 16, focusing on the situation in American higher education. For 90 minutes, Kirsten Weld (Harvard), Bill Mullen (Purdue), and Deborah Cohn...
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ALBA's film discussion series continues with a Pride Month feature and Jaime Camino's "Spain Again," with Alvah Bessie.
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Last year, a group of Yale undergraduates got the chance to immerse themselves in two kinds of archives: the university’s unique Spanish Civil War collection and the streets of...
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On March 23, ALBA celebrated Women’s History Month at the International Center of Photography, in New York, with photographer Espe Pons, the author of Maybe Never Again, a photobook...
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Dear Friends, Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. For the first time in the 16-year history of the ALBA/Puffin Award, two recipients received the full prize: Bay Resistance and...
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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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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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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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The First World War II casualty from Lewiston, Idaho, did not die at Pearl Harbor, but in Spain.
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In September, the ALBA office received a note from Judith Adler, a retired professor of sociology at Memorial University in Canada.
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On the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court case Pennsylvania v. Nelson, which wiped state sedition laws off the books, Steve Nelson’s grandson reminisces about the beloved commissar of...
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Gotham at War: A History of New York City from 1933 to 1945, by Mike Wallace. Oxford, 2025, 976 pp.
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Maybe Never Again, by Espe Pons, 2025. 221 pp. $109. Available at espepons.com.
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Militarized Masculinity in Spain and Chile: Remembering Violence through Film and Literature, by Lisa DiGiovanni, Toronto, 2025, 301 + xiii pp.
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Rome: Pedestrians Beware, by Rafael Alberti, translated by Anthony Geist, with essays by Geist & Giuseppe Leporace and photographs by Adam Weintraub, Swan Isle Press, 2024, 200 pp., 101...
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Manuel Periáñez, who died in Paris on February 9, was the proud son of Spanish Republicans.
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Joining ALBA’s New York office through a year-long fellowship made possible by ALBA’s partnership with the Open Horizon Foundation is Oliwia Karczmarska, who will be focusing on social media...
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The first winner of the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, the former Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón, will be presiding a truth commission whose creation the Spanish government announced...
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A new episode of the podcast “Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War” is now available. In the podcast, which premiered in October 2024, historians Patricia Schechter and Dan Czitrom...
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Leaf through the print edition of The Volunteer.
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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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A new episode of the podcast “Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War” is now available. In the podcast, which premiered in October 2024, historians Patricia Schechter and Dan Czitrom discuss the impact of the Spanish war on their and others’ families. This episode features the children of Anna and Alvin Warren. Below is a...
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In 2025 the fourth stage of ALBA’s Passport Project wrapped up. The fourth stage focused on volunteers on whom we have very little information to enable a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) search. Most of the volunteers submitted had at least a year of birth to reference. Expectations...
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On the fiftieth anniversary of Franco’s death, the New York Times published an article by Jason Horowitz about the “nostalgia” for Francisco Franco being expressed by a growing number of younger Spaniards, most of whom have no direct experience of the dictator. As is common these days in the Times’ coverage of any number...
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The family of Paul Andrew Mooney (1910-1961) is searching for documentation to substantiate information he provided to his family about serving in the International Brigades. Paul Mooney was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Hughes High School in 1929 and attended the University of Cincinnati in 1929, 1935 and 1936. In...
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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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The first thirty-six Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Phase IV were submitted December 30, 2024. Phase IV is intended to focus on volunteers on whom we have minimal information. At some point in the future, I plan to resubmit some volunteers who were returned as not found or on whom no information...
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My grandfather (Nana), Suresh, moved to the United States in 1959 as a young man on a student visa pursuing his master’s degree. His parents, my great grandparents, sought value in being ‘foreign educated’ and bringing his education home – to Mumbai, India to run their family business. 2 years after my Nana moved...
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Peter N. Carroll, a respected and prolific writer, poet, and US historian, died after a short illness on September 16, surrounded by his family. He was 80. Born in New York City in 1943 to a secular Jewish family, Peter grew up in the Bronx and Queens, where his father worked as a composer,...
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LA RÉPUBLIQUE -QUOTIDINEN DE COMBAT RADICAL ET SOCIALISTE, February 5, 1938 Foreign Volunteer Arrested On March 27 last, 29 North Americans were arrested on board the boat Sans-Pareil while they were attempting to reach the Spanish Coast. They were sentenced to a prison term for violating the decree of February 18, 1937 on the...
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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...
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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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