US social worker Thyra Edwards with a group of children during the Spanish Civil War. Opportunity vol. 16 (1938): 85.

The Watt Essay Prize committee was excited to receive 45 submissions this past year from students from the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America with an especially robust number of submissions from undergraduate and graduate students.

This year, the Watt Committee awarded three prizes for wonderful pre-collegiate student submissions. Taryn Cunningham’s historical fiction in three parts tells the story of a child in Civil War Spain who was taken by the church at birth and handed over to wealthy religious parents only to learn her true identity just before her communion. It is a deeply emotional telling of the baby-trafficking carried out under Franco. Yvana Martínez submitted “Papá Antonio,” a historical fiction piece about a grandson who takes his grandfather to see Pablo Picasso’s Guernica soon after it was returned to Spain. In a wonderful example of historical memory, the grandfather, who lived through the bombing of the city, recounts what happened to him for the first time. Finally, Jangwon Yoon used a sweeping range of sources, including primary documents found on the ALBA website, to discuss African American soldiers serving in the International Brigades, showing how their participation expanded the American civil rights movement.

Members of the Watt Committee were thrilled to get a chance to meet and hear presentations from the undergraduate and graduate recipients of this year’s award. Natàlia Espachs, who wrote her essay “Anarchism in Barcelona on the eve of the Civil War: Understanding the Social Revolution through Social History” while she was an undergraduate student at the University of St. Andrews, discussed the unique socio-economic conditions in specific neighborhoods of Barcelona that drew people to the Anarchist movement. She also documents the change of Anarchism in the 1930s in the city and corresponding anarchist violence. Natàlia was drawn to this work in part because she is from the region.

Kathleen Brown, a graduate student at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) who is completing a doctoral dissertation in American Studies, presented her essay “The Fight of the Retaguardia: US-American Social Workers Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy and Colonias Infantiles.” Brown described her fascinating research on support for children’s colonies and refugees that included sources from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives housed at the Tamiment Library at New York University. The committee applauded Espachs’ and Brown’s valuable research of these two scholars in advancing our understanding of the Spanish Civil War. The full-text versions of the winning submissions in all three categories are available at alba-valb.org/education/essays/.

The jury for the 2024 George Watt Memorial Essay was comprised of Robert Coale (Université de Rouen), Angela Giral (Columbia University), Joshua Goode (Claremont Graduate University), Jo Labanyi (New York University) Aaron Retish (Wayne State University), Shantha Susman (writer and movement strategist), Josephine Yurek (New York City Public Schools), and Nancy Wallach (New York City Public Schools). The Watt award honors the memory of Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran George Watt (1914-1994), a social worker, writer, and lifelong activist central to the creation of ALBA. The personal correspondence between George and Ruth Watt during the Spanish Civil War was made into a play, whose the script and performance by actors Vero Maynez and Nathan Payne can be found on the ALBA website. The play, written by Dan and Lynn Watt and titled George & Ruth, Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War, can also be purchased in book form at your local bookstore.

Aaron B. Retish, the chair of ALBA’s board, is a professor of Russian history at Wayne State, where he also oversees the Abraham Lincoln Scholarship program.