As this issue is going to print, ALBA’s Human Rights Committee is hard at work finalizing the process of selecting this year’s winner of the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. Keep an eye on your email and social media for an announcement. Jack Mayerhofer, chair of ALBA’s Human Rights Committee said, “We are...
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In another year of strong submissions from students across the United States and Europe, the jury of the Watt Essay prize was pleased to award prizes to six promising scholars.
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On Sunday, December 7, at a holiday gathering in NYC, descendants of veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, ALBA board members, and supporters gathered under the theme, “The Things We Carry.” Brought together by familial ties and mission, descendants of ALB vets reflected on...
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This past November 4, the Spanish government honored a promise made in the 2022 Law of Democratic Memory by approving the applications for Spanish citizenship for some 170 descendants...
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The painter Wifredo Lam (1902-1982), whose work is on display in a long-overdue MoMA retrospective, spent his formative years in Spain—where in 1936 he joined the defense of the...
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Ninety years is a particularly significant interval of time, as it matches, more or less, the limits of a human being’s lifespan.
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What is it like for Spanish high school students to learn about the International Brigades today? History teacher Ioseba Landa reports from the trenches.
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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...
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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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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...
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Lindsey Tyne spent much of last summer carefully studying more than two hundred posters from the Spanish Civil War that were first brought to the United States by the...
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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 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,...
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Giles Tremlett, El Generalísimo: a Biography of Francisco Franco. New York: Oxford University Press, 2025.
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Peter Davis, who died in December, was an activist filmmaker in the school of Joris Ivens.
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Victor Grossman was a lifelong communist, journalist, and bridge-builder between the United States and the socialist world.
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I am dedicating my contribution to ALBA to a veteran of the Lincoln Brigade who was born and raised in Galicia, Spain.
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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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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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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...
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Peter Verburgh’s translation from the French Newpaper Le Journal about a group of 29 Americans arrested in France. “29 American Volunteers Arrested in Muret” Le Journal, 5 April 1937 Toulouse, 4 April- The Control services of the Non-Intervention Committee do not remain inactive, especially with the help of the French Police and Gendarmerie. Thus...
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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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